The Low-Down: Part 1 of 5

I’m almost done with my time in Macedonia, which I’d say has been successful.  I’m here investigating a USAID project that has given funds to a team of three NGOs to increase local government transparency in municipalities across Macedonia. 

The division of labor is thus.  The NGO Info-Centre receives funding from USAID and is responsible for documenting where it all goes.  The NGO Info-Centre, which handles multiple projects simultaneously, has delegated the project tasks to two other NGOs, the Center for Civil Communications (CCC) and the Educational Humanitarian Organization (EcHO).  CCC has prepared research to find out how transparent each of four municipalities currently is, as well as how transparent the citizens think their local government is.  This involves questions like: Is there a phone line where citizens can report corruption or make suggestions? If so, is it always staffed with an operator? If not, are all messages returned and relayed to the responsible officials in the local government?  EcHO, meanwhile, has established and overseen civic centers in each municipality where citizens can come and speak their mind. 

Thus far I have interviewed one of the two USAID officials in charge of the project, the director of the NGO Info-Centre, the director of CCC, an anti-corruption expert in Macedonia, and one local government official.  I have also observed a workshop hosted by CCC and EcHO with the officials of one municipality government, in which the CCC announced many statistics from their research that didn’t sit well with their audience.  That leaves at least one more NGO administrator and, if possible, the other USAID project manager as well.

In my interviews I have pursued a few key questions.  First, how do all of these institutions cooperate?  Are decisions made by hierarchy, consensus, deliberation, etc?  I’ve truly been surprised at how cohesively different groups are working together.  The USAID officials, who are from Macedonia but--in their own words--definitely working for the United States, have a positive relationship with the three NGOs.  The NGO administrators feel that USAID is well-intentioned, benevolent, and not too overbearing or demanding.  Likewise, the three NGOs cooperate very well.  The NGO Info-Centre is atop this small pyramid because they receive and distribute the funding, but the NGO administrators collaborate weekly on their progress, and they have friendly personal relationships with each other.  Perhaps this is because this trio of NGOs was self-organized.  The NGO Info-Centre chose its two partners.  Finally, the NGOs working to make local governments more transparent have a balanced relationship with the government bureaucrats.  At a conference with both groups, the NGO administrators and local government officials mingled socially during meals and debated vigorously in meetings.  Importantly, these local governments were not forced to participate in this project; they were asked and they agreed.  Likewise, the NGOs telling them how to be more transparent do not have coercive power.  They tell them how transparent they are and what they can do to be better, but these are only suggestions, which can be rejected.

My second question regards how the project can be sustained in the future.  The project ends in three years, and the funding source--USAID--is scheduled to move out of Macedonia in 2015 (then again one should probably be skeptical of any US exit strategy).  I’ve found this aspect of the project weak.  There certainly isn’t a unified idea between the institutions.  One NGO administrator suggested that USAID’s funding will probably have to be replaced by funding from foreign NGOs.  Another said that the civic centers that have opened in each municipality aren’t expensive to maintain, so sustainability shouldn’t be a problem.  The same administrator suggested that maybe the local government will see the benefit of the civic centers and pay to keep them open.  That would be a very democratic solution assuming the centers remain autonomous, but can one truly expect people to faithfully monitor officials who have power over their paychecks?  Overall, there doesn’t seem to be any sustainability strategy, or a clear appreciation that one will be necessary.

My final area of interest has been whether this project is democratic: do Macedonian citizens want more transparency in their local governments?  For example, local governments have been made more important by a decentralization of power that was encouraged by the European Union and the US.  The project was initiated and announced by USAID, not by any representatives of Macedonian citizens.  The project is implemented by NGOs--obviously not elected.  And the local government officials who consented to participate in the project are not directly elected by anyone; they are appointed by the elected mayor.  When I asked my interviewees if citizens want more government transparency, they were consistently dumbfounded, as though I had popped their paradigm.  Of course they do. Who doesn’t want transparency?   That’s a good question, and one to which neither I--nor they-- have the answer, because they never asked.  The CCC conducted surveys with a thousand citizens, business people, and NGO workers across four municipalities asking various questions about how transparent the local government is, but they never asked: Do you want your local government to be more transparent?  So why didn’t they ask?  Based on my interviewees’ reactions, I would guess that it doesn’t occur to them.  A more cynical explanation is that the question is too risky.  If people answered that they didn’t want more government transparency, the NGO workers would have planned a project for nothing; the project would lose all legitimacy, and NGO employees would have to find a new paycheck.

Two interesting things happened in my interviews regarding this democratic deficit.  Twice interviewees argued I’m a citizen and I want more transparency.  This is an obvious fallacy, since their vision of the society is worth exactly one vote in a democracy, and they, as workers in NGOs that monitor government transparency, have a very biased opinion.  Second, a very interesting statistic was given.  In one municipality, there was not any phone line citizens could call to make complaints, offer suggestions, or make inquiries.  But 70% of the municipality’s citizens answered that there was such a phone line.  Ha! said my interviewee.  This proves that the people aren’t informed by their local government because they think something about the government that isn’t true.  They must be informed!  In my view, an alternative interpretation of this data could be that there is a low demand for such a phone line in the community.  At least those 70% don’t seem to want or need a phone line to call, or else they would have discovered that one didn’t exist.  Also, considering the 70% are simply wrong about the existence of said phone line, we should hardly accept that the other 30% know what they’re talking about.  They might have been guessing that no phone line existed with exactly the same ignorance as the other 70%.

Of course, the conclusion to be drawn is not that Macedonian citizens don’t want government transparency.  The conclusion is that neither USAID, the NGO sector, nor I have any idea what Macedonian citizens want to do to make their government better if we don’t ask.  And changing the relationship between government and the citizens without the citizens’ consent is undemocratic, which undermines the whole point of the project.  Government transparency seems straight-forward enough.  It is unlikely that citizens would say they don’t want transparency in government.  But if that’s the case, there’s all the more reason to ask them and make this project popularly legitimate.

Overall, my experience in Macedonia has supported one of my over-arching ideas about development work.  Despite the flaws that I have criticized, the people I’ve met working in development are all earnest in their intentions and their desires to make the country stronger, safer, and more prosperous.  If I continue to observe this in other countries I visit, it will suggest that the lack of development in much of the world is not the fault of the people involved, but something else.  I don’t know what it would be, but I have at least four countries left to find out.