DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 344 820 SO 021 913

AUTHOR Mason, John P., Ed.; Clark, Mari H., Ed. TITLE New Directions in U.S. Foreign Assistance and NE! Roles for Anthropologists. Studies in Third World Societies, Publication Number Forty-Four. INSTITUTION College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA. Dept. of Anthropology. PUB DATE Apr 91 NOTE 174p. PUB TYPE Collected Works - General (020)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PC07 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Anthropology; *Developing Nations; Foreign Countries; *Foreign Policy; Futures (of Society); International Relations; *Social Scientists; World Affairs IDENTIFIERS *Foreign Aid

ABSTRACT Civen recent developments throughout the world, the status of U.S. foreign assistance policies is uncertain. This document is a collection of papers whose authors, all anthropologists concerned with developing nations, critically examinenew directions in development assistance in the 1990s, The papers includean introduction (M. Clark; J. Mason); "The Future of Foreign Assistance" (G. Britan); "Humanizing the Development Paradigm" (M. Clark); "Actions of the U.S. Congress toward Environmentally Sustainable Foreign Assistance" (K. Moran); "Restructuring National Economies: The Challenge to Development Anthropology" (P. Boyle); "Socialand Institutional Analysis in the African Economic Policy Reform r4rogram" (P. Vondal); "Development Anthropologyin a Rapidly Urtimizing World" (J. Mason); "Gender Issues in Microenterprlse Assistance" (M. Clark); "The Development Fund for Africa: New Opportunities forAnthropology in A.I.D." (D. Hess); and "Practicing the Anthropology of Development: Comments on 'Anthropology and ForeignAssistance" (R. Netting). (DB)

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Internationai Editorial Advisory Board

Carlos H. Aguilar (University of CostaRica), Muhammad Ali (Universityof Malaya), Jacques AL'yot (ChulalongkornUniversity, ), Ghaus Ansari (Kuwait University), George N.Appell (Brandeis University), HaroldBarciay (University of Alberta, Canada), EttaBecker-Donner (Museum fur Volkerkunde, Vienna, Austria), Harumi Befu (StanfordUniversity), Ignacio Bernal (Instituto Nacional de Antropologiae Historia, Mexico), Ronald M. Berndt(University of Western Australia), Fernando Camara(Instituto Nacional de Antropologiae Historia, Mexico), Paulo de Carvalho-Neto(Sao Paulo, Brazil), S. Chandrasekhar (California State University), K.C. Chang(Harvard University), Chen Chi-lu (National Taiwan University, China),Hackeny Choe (Seoul NationalUniversity, Korea), George Coelho (NationalInstitute of Mental Health, Maryland),Ronald Cohen (University of Florida),Ronald Crocombe (University of thePacific, Fiji Island), May N. Diaz (University of California,Berkeley), Fred Eggan (University of Chicago), S. C. Dube (IndiaInstitute of Advanced Study, India),S. N. Eisenstadt (Hebrew University, Israel),Gabriel Escobar M. (PennsylvaniaState University and Lima, Peru), ClaudioEsteva Fabregat (University ofBarcelona, Spain), Orlando Fa ls Borda (Bogota,Colombia), Muhammad Fayyaz(Punjab University, Pakistan, and Queens University,Canada), C. Dean Freudenberger (School of Theology, Claremont,California), Isao Fujimoto (Universityof California, Davis), C.von Furer-Haimendorf (London School ofOriental and African Studies, England),Dante Germino (University ofVirginia), Walter

III

4 Goldschmidt (University of California,Los Angeles), Nancie I.. Gonzalez(Boston University), W. W. Howells (HarvardUniversity), Charles C. Hughes (University of Utah Medical Center), Erwin Johnson(State University of New York, Buffalo), Victor T. King (University of Hull),Koentjaraningrat (University of ), T. A. Lambo (World HealthOrganizabon, Switzerland), Gottfried 0. Land (University of Colorado), Diane K. Lewis(University of California, Santa Cruz), Abdoulaye Ly (University of Dakar,), Robert A. Manners (Brandeis University), Jamshed Mavalwala(University of Toronto, Canada), Eugenio Fernandez Mendez (Universidad de PuertoRico), Alfredo T. Morales (National Research and Development Centrefor Teacher Education, University of the Philippines), Gananath Obeyesekere(Princeton University, N.J.), Gottfried Oosterwal (Andrews University), MorrisE. Op ler (University of Oklahoma), Alfonso Ortiz (New Mexico), AkinRabibhadana (Thammasat University, Thailand), V. J. Ram (United Nations,Beirut, Lebanon), J. B. Romain (CRESHS, Haiti), Renato I. Rosa Ido (StanfordUniversity), Irving Reuse (Yale University), Kernial S. Sandhu (Institute of SoutheastAsian Studies, Singapore), Spiegal- Rosing (Rhur-Universitat Bochum,Germany), Rodolfo Stavenhagen (El Colegio de Mexico), Akira Takahashi(University of Tokyo, Japan), Reina Torres deArauz (Instituto Nacional de Cultura yDeportes, Panama), Donald Tugby (Queensland University, Australia), Victor C.Uchendu (University of Illinois and Kampala, Uganda), Lionel Vallee (Universityof Montreal, Canada), Mario C. Vasquez (National Office of Agrarian Reform, Peru),L. P. Vidyarthi (Ranchi University, India), B. M. Villanueva (United Nations,New York City), Wong Soon Ka' (Kuching, Sarawak), Inger Wulff(Danish National Museum).

iv CONTENTS

Publication Number Forty-four April :991

NEW DIRECTIONS IN U.S.FOREIGN ASSISTANCE AND NEW ROLES FORANTHROPOLOGISTS JOHN P. MASON MARI H. CLARK Guest Editors PAGE

Introduction Mari H. Clark and Jon P. Mason vii The Future of ForeignAssistance Gerald M. Britan 1 Humanizing the DevelopmentParadigm Mari H. Clark 13 Actions of the U.S. CongressToward Environmentally Sustainable Foreign Assistance Katy Moran 27 Restructuring National Economies:The Challenge to Development Anthropology Philip Boyle 47 Social and InstitutionalAnalysis in the African Economic Policy ReformProgram Patricia J. Vondal 61 Development Anthropologyin a Rapidly Urbanizing World John P. Mason 79 Gender Issues inMicroenterprise Assistance Mari H. Clark 109

fi PAGE

The Development Fund forAfrica: New Opportunities for Anthropology in A.I.D. 135 David W. Hess

Practicing the Anthropology ofDevelopment: Comments on "Anthropologyand Foreign Assistance" 147 Robert McC. Netting 153 Notes on Contributors

vi INTRODUCTION

NEW DIRECTIONS INU.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCEAND NEW ROLES FORANTHROPOLOGISTS

MARI H. CLARK and JOHN P. MASON'

The world is changingat an acceleratingpace in remarkable significantly affecting the ways that are nature, substance, and modesof delivery of U.S.foreign assistance. Fiveyears ago, who would havedared to imagine that Pact countries would be the Warsaw holding elections andseeking to build marketeconomies in the wake of Perestroikain the U.S.S.R.? Who and Western would have believedthat Arab powers would join forces toremove Iraqi troops from Kuwait? Forty years ago, whowould have predicted to rubble by World War that Japan, a nationreduced II, would beone of the largest donors offoreign assistance?Nor would they haveguessed that the then countries such as Korea, "underdeveloped" Taiwan, and Saudi Arabiawould be extending their growing trade andinvestment into theAmericas? anticipated the election of No one would have femaie presidents andprime ministers incountries such as the Philippinesand Bangladesh.

These and other developments accentuate the implications ofa statement made by foreign aidexperts to the Advisory Aid, in September committee on VoluntaryForeign 1989. "US. foreignassistance is ata crossroads and current social, political, andeconomic realitiesare likely to alter fundamentally definition and conductinto the next century." its

vii crossroads" provided theimpetus The challenge of"foreign assistance at a collection of papers. Thecontributors, all practicingdevelopment for the present in development assistancein anthropologists, criticallyexamine new directions address cutting-edgepolicy issues in U.S.foreign the 1990s. Their papers the impact of macroeco- assistance such as sustainingthe environment, assessing cf an urbanizingdeveloping nomic policy reforms,addressing the problems into developmentassistance for small andmicro- world, integrating women for Africa, and measuringand entrepreneurs, estabhshingthe Development Fund evaluating development programperformance. these issues for new The authors also discussthe implications of the key contributions of directions in developmentanthropology. They identify and methodologicaltmils and note the newskills anthropology's analytical respond to the changingworld acquired from otherdisciplines and reshaped to of development assistance. their papers at the 1989 The authors originallypresented earlier drafts of the AmericanAnthropological Associationin a panel annual meetings of A New Role for Develop- discussion of "Anthropologyand Foreign Assistance: Since that event, the authorshave revised their papers ment Anthropologists?" foreign assistance front. to incorporate newdevelopments on the ever-changing Anthropology and the The National Associationfor the Practice of sponsored the panel. Allthe Association for Politicaland Legal Anthropology mcmbers of the Washington presenters, with theexception of the discussant, were Anthropologists. With the exceptionof the discussant Association of Professional International and Katy Moran, allthe presenters workedfor the Agency for Development (AID.), either asconsultants or as foreignservice officers. Katy a Congressionalstaff person. The discussant, Moran worked for many years as Arizona base, Robert McC Nettingpractices anthropologyfrom a University of consultant and by instilling anunderstanding of both as a development students and colleagues. development anthropologyin the minds of his To set the stage forthese papers, focused onthe future of foreign examine the history ofU.S. assistance, it is useful torevisit the past briefly to role that anthropologistshave played therein. AsKaty foreign assistance and the originated Moran notes in thisvolume, foreign assistance as aU.S. national policy the end of World War11. U.S. with the 1947 Marshallplan to rebuild Europe at developing world in the 1950s.The U.S. was the first country aid shifted to the decade, the U.S. to offer economicassistance as a nationalpolicy. Until the past lecl other donors inabsolute dollar amounts ofaid dispersed.

viii In his discussion of "Anthropologyand Development" Alan Hobenoffers valuable historical insights relevantto points raised by the authors in thisvolume, particularly Gerald Britan, Mari Clark,and Katy Moran. Hoben himselfserved as senior anthropologist for AID. for threeyears in the late 1970s, as dida number of other anthropologists.

Hoben stresses the "complexinstitutional environmen in whichdomr agencies operate" (Hoben 1982:353).In other words, foreign assistanceis not a simple matter of identifying needsand delivering assistance.Many institutional actors with different and competinginterests are engaged in influencingthe direction of foreign assistance.

For the U.S., ti,e historical basisfor this complex institutionalenvironment was the, "unlikely and unstable coalition" ofinterest groups (conservative, military, business, humanitarian,and liberal) that shaped theoriginal Foreign Assistance Act. That legislation combinesthe defense goal of stoppingthe spread of communism in the developingworld with the mutually beneficialexpansion of trade between rich andpoor nations, the fostering of democraticpolitical institutions, and the pursuit of humanitariangoals (Hoben 1982:352;see also He !linger, Hellinger, and O'Regan1988).

The annual allocation of foreignassistance to spedfic countriesand programs involves an even wider array of institutionalactors and interests. In her analysis of A.I.D., Kathleen Staudtdescribes the Agencyas "vulnerable to U.S. constituency groups and the ensuing multiple goals their support entails"(Staudt 1985:24).Congressional interests and those ofthe interest groups who lobby Congress, influence foreign assistancethrough "earmarks," that is, fundsset aside for specific uses suchas the Global Warming Initiative related byKaty Moran, the African Development Funddescribe(' by David Hess, andthe earmarks for women in development and microenterprise notedby Mari Clark. Other vehicles are throuph committee reports, studies,hearings, and reporting requirements.

Various Federal agencies, suchas the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Treasury, the State Department, andthe Department of Defensealso have differing objectives regarding theuse of foreign assistance funds for particular country programs. In addition, theadministration in power mayuse the enabling legislation to pursue shortterm strategic goals thatmay conflict with long term sustainable development goals. Finally,the Agency for International has goals and standards that Development may change when its kadership changes(Hoben 1982:352-3; He !linger, Hellinger andO'Regan 1988; Staudt 1985).2

It is in this complex institutionalcontext that development anthropologists have been working as advisors, consultants, legislative aids,civil servants, and

ix foreign service officers. KatyMoran's paper on "Actions of theU.S. Congress this Toward Environmentally SustainableForeign Assistance" vividly portrays complexity in her accounts ofcongressional procedures and theirnegotiation inside congressional committeework related to foreign assistance. Hoben observes that, as of theearly 1980s, anthropology hadmade little lasting impact on development theory orpractice and anthropologists hadplayed only a peripheral role indevelopment assistance (Hoben1982351). By 1988 Michael Horowitz could argue thatanthropologists had at least made significant substantive contributions to discreet areasof development assistance (seeClark "Humanizing...." in this volume) but they werestill ineffective advocates for the importance of their contributions todevelopment assistance (Horowitz1988).

In the 1940s, anthropologists werefairly prominent in public policycircles and were highly involved in theTruman Administration's planningfor foreign aid.

In the1950s,the International CooperativeAdministration (ICA), established in 1948, employedanihropologists as interpreters of tradition.Their role was to facilitate thediffusion of technology by finding way s to overcome resistance due to traditionalvalues, institutions, and practices. amendment to the Foreign In1961A.1.D. was established by an Assistance Act. Througat,ut the60s, economists' models of"economic take-off" and "trickle-down" effects came tothe forefront. Development effortsincreasingly concentrated on the urban industrialsector, infrastructure,and capital intensive technological innovation. The aim was tostimulate savings and capitalformation and to foster an entrepreneurialclass.Anthropologists disappeared from the development scene, lacking eithertheory or vision to redirect thepath of development assistance. By the 1970s, it was clear thatthe economies were not "takingoff' as expected nor were benefits "tricklingdown" to the poor. The capital-intensiveand urban-focused industrial programsof the 60s had exacerbated therural-urban gap, with longlasting negative repercussions fordevelopment assistance that John Mason discusses in detail. In 1973 and 1975 the "NewDirections" amendments to theForeign Assistance Act required A.I.D. togive greater emphasis topromoting more equitable income distribution andemployment opportunities for the poorand to use more laborintensive "appropriat,tehnologies in agriculture and capital projects such as road construction.The legislation required that the poormajority participate in decisions that shapetheir lives (1 loben 1982:357). As notedby Mari Clark, the 1973 Percy Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act alsorequired A.I.D. to integratewomen fully into its development activities.

In the 1970s, therewas a renewed and critical intereston the part of anthropologists regarding developmenttheory and the underdevelopmenteffects of colonialism. By the and-seventiesgrowing concern about thepoor along with the New Directions Legislationbrought anthropologists intoa variety of roles in U.S. development assistance(Hoben 1982:357).

This brings us to the 1980sera of macroeconomic adjustment and policy reforn, discussed by Gerald Britan,Philip Boyle, Pat Vondal, andMari Clark, and to the present 1990s crossroads indevelopment assistance, addressedby all of the authors. It is important to keep inmind that the articles in thisvolume represent the views of the authors and should not be interpretedas a statement of the views of the federal and privateinstitutions for which they work.

Complementing the lntroduction, thefirst two papers provideback- ground and context for therest of the papers.

"The Future of Foreign Assistance," by Gerald Britan, brieflyreviews foreign assistance strategies of the 1970s and 80s. Heexamines the need forre- thinking U.S. Foreign assistanceand lists some of itscommon failings. His weaves his qualified predictions for thefuture into a discussion ofstrategic management changes within the Agency for International Devek-v-lient. Onekey change has been the shift, starting in the80s, from projects taro,0 Niat alleviating particular pockets of poverty toan emphasis on coordinatedprograms that make a difference for overall hostcountry development. Another isa renewed concern for achieving and measuring more significant developmentresults.Britan anticipates a growing demand for socialanalysis skills in the 1990s but thesewill have to be combined with greater facility in economic and politicalanalysis as well as for management andorganizational development.

In "Humanizing the DevelopnwntParadigm", Mari Clark describesthe growing dissatisfaction among development practitioners about themacroeco- nomic paradigm that hasdominated foreign assistancein recent years. Thi:. relates to their cont..ern (or re-introducing the human elementinto development thinking and practice. She suggests opportunities for social scientistsin the 1990s to combine anthropoleAical, economic,and pelicy analysis in orderto put people back into the development equation. In addition to the nt.edfor more participato- ry development, she also stressesthe importance of recognizingcritical differences between people that affectthe impact of developmentassistance such as gender, generation, and ethnic affiliation.

xi r

The next paper offers aninsider's view of the intricateongoing process of reshaping U.S. foreignassistance.

Katy Moran's "Actions ofthe U.S. Congress TowardEnvironmentally choreogra- Sustainable Foreign Assistance"describes the complex congressional Initiaive". She traces how andwhy it was developed phy of the "Global Warming reauthorization of the and drafted in response todebate in Congress over the Foreign Assistance Act. Thenshe describes how it waseventually incorporated Operations Appropria- into the report languagefor the Subcommittee on Foreign portrays the congressio- tion and established aspublic law. In telling this tale, she and informal rules. nal committees, theirresponsibilities, procedures, policies, This includes a detailed narrative onthe Foreign Assistance Actand the controversy and debate aboutforeign assistance goals and costs.Moran observes with skills as that anthropologists' trainingand field experience equip them They can use this to translate concernsbetween those who culture brokers. interests in formulate and implement federalpolicy and those who have special the policy or are affected by it. The next two papers discussattempts to assess the impactof the macroeconomic policy reformefforts of the 1980s.

In "RestructuringNational Economies: TheChallenge to Development Anthropology," Philip Boyle explainsthe steps taken in thestabilization and structural adjustment efforts of theInternational Monetary Fund and theWorld Bank. These measures aim toaddress long-term policy reformneeds of developing countries in order to generatethe renewed growth necessary toend trade imbalances and providefor internal social development.He analyzes the anticipated and unintended effectsof this structural transformationalong with the use of policy reformconditionality in foreign assistance.Boyle also discusses the Social Dimensions ofAdjustment (SDA) Project of theWorld Bank which attempts to assess andmonitor the household leveleffects of structural adjustment. He examines concernsraised by developmentprofessionals regarding policy-based sector assistance andsummarizes critical policy reforminformation Boyle poses a needs, stressing the importanceof adequate sector assessments. challenge to anthropologiststhat they should not standidly by while macro- efforts such as th SDA economists and statisticiansreinvent social institutions in project. Making a differencerequires penetrating the dominantmodels of economic development andrevealing their inability to resolvecritical socio- political and micro-economic questions.

"Social and Institutional Analysisin the African Economic PolicyReform this area, in Program," by Patricia Vondal, tracesthe genesis of A.1.D. etforts in md. She describes concert with the WorldBank and the InternationalMonetary

xii 1 3 her assessment of thequality and usefulnessof the social and institutional analysis incorporated in AIDpolicy reform design documentsfor Sub-Saharan Africa. She then highlightsstriking analyticalgaps uncovered by her study. These included the need for analysisand assessment of impact (which reduce or eliminate of liberalization reforms government regulation of certainaspects of the economy) and privatization reforms(which expect the privatesector to take over important public sector economicactivities and services). The identified the need for study also a better understanding of the institutionaland political context of policy reform and foranalysis of the potentialimpacts of all elements of economic policy reform programs on people. Vondal then outlinesthe key components that should be included in social and institutionalguidelines for A.I.D. sectoral developmentassistance and economic policy that the anthropologist's reform. She suggests analytical framework forexamining the dynamics of institutions and individual adaptations to the largereconomy can make a valuable contr;bution here if it is informedby an understanding of and policy analysis. macroeconomic theory

The next paper focuses on a critical development issue withwhich U.S. foreign assistance is only beginning to reckon. In"Development Anthropologyin a Rapic11) Urbanizing World," JohnMason demonstrates thaturbanization is a national socioeconomic anddemographic trend which points out that the growth continues unabated. He of towns and cities in thedeveloping world has not necessarily been accompaniedby economic developmentas has generally been the case in the West.Mason contends that thereis an urban-rural divide donor agencies and LDC within governments which limits theattention given to both positive and negative effectsof urbanizationon overall national growth and development. He suggests thatdevelopment anthropologistsare well-suited to enhance the understanding ofthe dynamics of rural-urbanlinkages and to identify ways to incorporatethis in developmentinterventions. The last two papers discuss congressionally earmarked fundsthat were established to assure that U.S.development assistance addresses poor people in developing countries. the needs of

In "Gender Issues inMicroenterprise Assistance,"Mari Clark points out the inherently anthropologicalnature of the women in development which stresses the initiative importance of people indevelopment and the needto recognize critical differencessuch as gender, generation,and ethnic affiliation. She details the importanteconomic contributions ofwomen in small enterprises, most often in the unregistered,uncounted businesses in the examines the constraints "informal sector". She on their endeavors in small andmicroenterprise and on their participation indevelopment assistance directedtoward them. She then trac:!s the interrelated histories ofA.I.D. efforts inwomen in development and in of the way a microenterprise assistance. Clarkconcludes with an illustration learn from past development anthropologist can usesocial-institutional analysis to bureaucratic obstacles to mistakes in order to identifyand circumvent potential the participation of womenin small and microenterpriseefforts.

"The Development Fund forAfrica: New Opportunitiesfor Anthropology positive note with apeople- in A.I.D.," by DavidHess ends the volume on a foreign assistance that placesgreater emphasis on orier*nd model for future Development Fund For Africa accountability and results.Hess explains how the disappointment and frustration at (DFA) earmark was born outof congressional quality of life for the vastmajority the failure of foreignassistance to improve the having an impact on thelives of of Africa's people.Stressing the importance of people, he highlights thekey principles of the DFA:1) to establish programming priorities; 21 to focus on alimited number of problems;3) to concentrate resources achieve meaningfulresults; and 4) to measure, where AID. can expect to performance is making a evaluate, and report resultswhich indicate that A.LD. He then describes the programplanning, monitoring, difference in Africans' lives. used to guide them evaluating, End reporting processand the conceptual tools and result that forces to the such as the objective tree - agraphic display of cause else? and so what? inidentifying strategic goals and planner to ask how? what will continue to objectives. Hess stresses thatanthropologists have played and the DFA, helping A.I.D.understand the social, cultural, play an important role for provide incentives to and institutiona! structures,behaviors, and values which Africans. Development: Comments on In"Practicingthe Anthropology of Anthropology and ForeignAssistance," Robert McCNetting reviews the key anthropological studies of insights presented in thisvolume. He concludes that decision-making and changethat are both micro-leveland are aware of larger results for three reasons. systems are indispensablefor improving development models of economists and First, they question theundifferentiated macroeconomic economics based oninequality and external power. the theories of political adjustments at the Second, they see economicallyrealistic adaptation and creative communities operating through level of the household,voluntary groups, and failures of indigenous change existing social structures.Third, the successes and by means of local casestudies must be analyzedcomparatively and historically and used to informdevelopment planning. scholars, policy Clearly this volume offersdevelopment practitioners and deal of food for thoughtabout the future of foreign makers, and planners a great anthropology. Those social assistance and newdirections for development scientists seeking a moredetailed account of the "insand outs" of employment in development will find avaluable resource in StalkingEmployment in the

xiv 1 5 Nation's Capital (Koons,Hackett and Mason 1989).The book includes chapters prepared by several of thepeople who crafted articlesfor this volume. The words of Michael Cernea,a senior anthropologist at the foreword to the Koons, World Bank, in his Hackett, and Mason volume,provide an appropriate ending for this introductionand transition to the volume: rem2inder of thepresent

The frontiers of thediscipline are being pushedfurther by practicing anthropologistsand more of themare needed. Perhaps our ultimate gratification,as well as heightened responsibility, derive from thesame source: our applied work,policy or operational, is directlyconsequential tomany people in real life (Cernea 1989:ii).

NOTES

Mari Clark and JohnMason are the joint editorsfor this volume and were the co-chairs for the panelat which thesepapers were first presented. Theyare both long term consultantsto the Agency for International Developmentthrough contracts withLabat Anderson Incorporated. Mari Clarkworks with the Officeof Women in Develop- ,,ent in the Bureau for Program and Policy Coordination.John Mason works in the Center forDevelopment Information same Bureau. The views presented and Evaluation in the in this introductionare those of the authors and do notrepresent those of either theAgency for International Development or Labat AndersonIncorporated. 2. See Britan et al (1989) fora critical review of fitty documents various perspectives representing on the problems inherent in U.S.foreign assistance.

X X' 1 t; REFERENCES

Britan, Gerald et. al. The Future of ForeignAssistance: A summary ofIssues 1989 D.C.: A.I.D. and AnnotaWdBibliography. Washington Evaluation OccasionalPaper No. 18.

Browne, Steven New York: New YorkUniversi- 1990 Foreign AID in Practice. ty Press.

Cernea, Michael M. Employment in the Nation's 1989 Foreword. In Stalking Capital. Koons et al 1989. pp.i-iii.

Douglas He !linger, and FredM. O'Regan Hollinger, Stephen, Report on the Future of 1988 Aid For Just Development: Foreign Assistance. BoulderColorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers (for theDevelopment Gorup forAlternative Policies).

Hobo), Alan Annual R of 1982 Anthropologists and Developnwnt. Anthropology 11: 349-375.

Horowitz, Michael New DevelopmentAgenda. 1988 Anthropology and the Development AnthropologyNewsletter 6(1):

Koons, Adam, BeatriceHackett, and John Mason Stalking Employment in theNation's Capital. Washing- 1989 Anthro- ton D.C.: WashingtonAssociation of Professional pologists

Staudt, Kathleen Administra- 1985 Women, ForeignAssistanceind Advocacy tion. New York: Praeger. THE FUTURE OF FOREIGN ASSISTANCE

GERALD M. BRITAN'

INTRODUCTION

U.S. foreign assistance has passedthrough a number of distinct phases over the past 30 years -- from a1960sconcern with building development infrastructure, to a1970s emphasis on alleviating poverty,through a1980sfocus on economic restructuring for growth.As foreign assistance strategieshave changed, so too have the roles andsignificance of social scientists inplanning, implementing, and evaluating developmentactivities. And, while opportunities for anthropologists and other social scientists grew rapidly during the1970s,they shrank nearly as fast in the 1980s. Inthe 1990s, however, opportunities forsocial scientists are beginning to expand rapidlyagain.

Today we appear to be in the midst ofanother major foreign aid shift. Pressures from Congress and outsideinterest groups, the rumblings ofan increasingly frustrated foreign assistancebureaucracy, the growing diversity of developing countries, and theemergence of dramatic new forces for political and economic freedom not only in Eastern Europe, but alsoin Asia, Africa, and Latin Americaall require new development thinking.New issues, strategies, and management formsare emerging as part of a new 1990s emphasison "open societies and open markets."But facilitating the transitionto political and

'The views expressed in thispaper are those of the author and donot necessarily reflect the views of theAgency for International Development. 2 economic freedom and, in particular developingthe institutional basis for democracy and growth --involves a new array of social sciencequestions. Thus, while the 1990s promise to be adecade of significantly increasedopportunities for applied social scientists,these social scien.ists will beaddressing substantially different problems than theyconsidered before.

PREVIOUS FOREIGN ASSISTANCESTRATEGIES of the U.S. foreign assistance haschanged dramatically during the course past several decades.During the1950sand1960s,the Agency for International Development and its predecessorsplaced their primary emphasis ondirectly transferring Western technologiesthrough large infrastructure andtechnical assistance projects. Bridges androads were constructed, ports wereimproved, communications were upgraded,factories were built, schools wereerected, colleges were staffed, andagricultural extensionists werefielded to provide the necessary materialbase from which economicgrowth was expected to naturally emerge. although most countries By the1970s,however, it had become clear that had experienced significantgrowth, poverty was persistingand in many cases getting worse. A.I.D.'sdevelopment projects were refocused on"new directions" Emphasis was placed for meeting the"basic humanneeds" of "the poor majority." facilitating on improvinghealth and human services,providing basic education, integrated rural development,and otherwise improving thecapabilities of indigenous organizations to better meetthe needs of the "poorest of thepoor." emerging debt, By the early1980s,following a series of economic shocks, falling trade, and several neareconomic collapses, U.S. foreignassistance programs changeddirection again. The emphasis nowturned to restimulating economii growth as a necessarypre-condition for improvements insocial and human welfare. The primaryvehicles were economic liberalization,private sector development, policy reform, andstructural adjustment.

As the focus of U.S.foreign assistance shifted, so too didthe mechanisms and organizational formsthrough which this assistance wasprovided. During the 1960s, A.I.D. and its predecessors wereprimarily involved in designing and approving large infrastructureand technology transfer projects,which were expected to directly generatepositive economic returns. Manyof these projects were fundedthrough loans and many weredirectly implemented by contractors and staff.

I H 3

During tilt 1970s, A.I.D. was still primarilyin a project assistance mode, but the emphasis of "new directions"was dramatically different. Projectswere targeted at particular problems ofpoverty and the needs of particulargroups of poor "beneficiaries," based on a thorough analysis ofthe nature and causes of poverty.Most projects sought to increase thecapabilities of indigenous organizations to meet the needs of thepoor ("institution building"), rather than directly providing services tothese beneficiaries through A.I.D.staff or contractors. Increasingly, development assistancewas provided in the form of grants rather than loans

Pv the 1980s, A.I.D. strategy hadshifted towards aneven more indirect involvement in development aimedat altering the policy and institutional structure fo. economic growth. Increasingemphasis was placed on non-project assistance, program lending, and policydialogue intended to createappropriate incentives and more "rational"resource allocations as a basis for renewed economic growth. This program lending placeda premium on capabilities for policy and economic analysisand for the negotiating skillsneeded to achieve agreement on acceptable policychanges.

These transitions had major implicationsfor staffing and organization of foreign assistance as well. During the1950s and 1960s, A.I.D. and itspredeces- sors were primarily technical agencies staffed Iv engineers,agronomists, and loan officers. By the 1970s, "new directions"required a whole newrange of skills in analyzing the social, economic, and politicaldimensions of poverty. At this time, A.LD. added a large number of socialscientists, including most of thepresent cohort of anthropologists. By the 1980s,however, A.I.D. was hiring economists, MBA's, and acco'intants, rather thansocial scientists.Being identified asan anthropologist was more likelyto harm than to help one'sprospects for employment.

THE CURRENT SITUATION

During the past few years,a broad consensus has been emerging thatU.S. foreign assistance needs rethinking. Agrowing array of reports from Congress, A.I.D., outside interestgroups, and academic researchers allagree that current foreign assistanceprograms are inadequate and thatnew approaches are drastically needed (see, for example, Bissell,1989; Britan et al, 1989; Hellingeret al, 1988; House Foreign Affairs Committee,1989; Phoenix Group, 1989; Smuckler et al, 1988; Woods, 1989; etc.). 4

This consensus rests on a commonrecognition of key development trends and foreign assistance problems.There is general agreement thateconomic growth is essential for long-termimprovements in human welfare, thatpolicy and institutioiwl changes will be necessaryin most countries to provide thebasis for such growth, and that markets aregenerally much more effectivethan central planning for allocating development resources.At the same time, there is also growing recognition that economicreform alone is insufficient, thatpolicy changes must be implementedthrough more effective institutions,that appropri- ately public functions must beimproved, and that steps will have tobe taken to ensure that thebenefits of economic growth arebroadly and equitably distribut- ed. Most outside commentators also see commonfailings that undercut the ability of U.S. foreign assistance programsto achieve these aims,including:

an obsolete ForeignAssistance Act, encumbered with 25 yearsof accretions, "barnacles," "earmarks,"and contradictory objectives;

too much emphasis onplanning, designing, and justifying the implementation of development programsand projects, but too little emphasis on achievingsignificant development results;

too much emphasis on monitoring"inputs" and "outputs", but too little evaluation of development impact;

too much emphasis onshort-term program and project results and too little emphasis onachieving sustainable development and employment growth;

too little program flexibility and toomuch Congressional micro- management;

too much reliance onpublic sector planning and interventions and too little emphasis on privatesector roles, market allocation, and political and economicliberalization;

too little concern aboutenvironmental preservation and the environmental implications ofdevelopment interventions. 5 THE FUTURE OF FOREIGN ASSISTANCE

Precisely what theseconcerns imply for the future form and substance of U.S. foreign assistance is difficultto predict. Radical changesthe creationof a foreign assistance foundation, thechanneling of the bulk of assistancethrough Private and Voluntary Organizations(PV0s), or the establishment ofa foreign assistance investment corporationpatterned on OPICare not inconceivable. Presuming that a substantial portionof foreign assistance willcontinue to be provided through an A.I.D.-likeorganization of resident Missionsdeveloping discrete programs and projects,some of the more likely changes include:

continued decentralization of authorityto country Missions, but increased accountability for results;

more focused intervention stratcgies, that recognizethe limits of U.S. assistance, the comparativeadvantages of A.I.D., and the particular skills of U.S. professionals;

more emphasis on minimizing social andeconomic costs and ensuring a broad and equitable distributionof economic benefits within a framework of continuedeconomic reform and political liberalization;

more emphasis on achieving significant developmentresults, on assessing program performance, andon using performance information to improveprogram management;

more emphasis on rapid appraisal and othercost-effective data collection and analysis techniques, butless emphasis on rigorous- ly designed development "research";

a closer integration of development planning,management, and evaluation.

Indeed, many of these changesare already occurring within A.I.D. During the past twoyears, AID. executives, the Regional Bureaus,Congress, and outside interest groups have all expressedincreasing concern about the needto reorient A.I.D.'s programmanagement and evaluation towardsdevelopment results. In many ways, thisrepresents the culmination ofa major shift in A.I.D.'s strategy, that began :n the early 1980s,from an emphasis on discrete projects targeted at alleviating particularpockets of primarily ruralpoverty to an emphasis on coordinatedprograms (including projects, non-project assistance,

0') 6 policy reform, and related efforts)aimed at making a difference foroverall host country development.This renewed concern withachieving more significant development results is reflectedin ongoing efforts by eachof the Regional Bureaus (and several CentralBureaus) to clarify programstrategies and objectives, to improve programevaluation guidance, to develop moreuseful program performanceindicators, to implement performance-basedbudgeting, and to better apply programperformance information in managementdecision- making. Most recently it has alsobeen expressed in the new A.I.D.Admini- strator's "Strategic Management"initiative (Roskens 1990). Following the usage of A.I.D.'sAfrica Bureau (and, increasingly, the broader parlance of the Agency), a"program" can be defined as the entire range of project, a non-project, andpolicy reform activities aimed atachieving a particular strategic objective.A strategic objective, in turn, represents some significant development achievement:increased private sector investment, improved agricultural productivity,decreased infant mortality, or the like. Inthe Africa Bureau's terms, a strategicobjective represents the highestlevel of development result to which A.I.D.directly contributes and for which itis willing to be held accountable.Such strategic objectives should bedefinable and linked at the Mission, Bureau,and Agency level. Few, however, are. While a major new f.).yhasis on"strategic thinking" is now emerging within A.I.D. (initially in the AfricaBureau, but more recently in Asiaand Near East Bureau (ANE) and the LatinAmerica and Caribbean Bureau (LAC) aswell), missions have historically developedtheir portfolios in a much morepiecemeal fashion. They have tended to designand fund a diverse range of projectsaimed at particular project results.Larger objectives have usually beenaddressed only in periodic "Country DevelopmentStrategies" that were loosely linked toproject activities.Missions have rarely articulatedclear strategies linking a series of project and non-project activities tohigher level development results.Such strategies have, until quite recently,been even less well defined atBureau and Agency-wide levels.

Much of the recent planning ferment inboth the ANE and Africa Bureaus can be seen in thislight as part of a broader Agency shift to moresharply define the most promising program strategiesthrough which significant development results can be achieved and to translatethese strategies into country programs The FY 1989-91 Action Plan of theDevelopment Fund for Africa, for example, articulated four strategic objectives forthe region:1)improving economic management, 2) strengtheningcompetitive markets, 3) developingthe potential for long-term increases in productivity,and 4) improving food security.During the past two years, the AfricaBureau has made a concertedeffort to help individual missions focus their programs morecoherently towards the achieve- 7

ments of these strategic objectives anddevelop related performance information systems to assess and reporton their progress.

More recently, the ANE Bureauinitiated a similar effort torefocus country programs around common "political and economic freedom" goals.The LAC Bureau is now also articulatinga comparable set of core objectives and has increased its efforts to help Missionsfocus their programs and developmore relevant performance indicators.

This increasingconcern with program planning and performanceis also reflected in ongoing efforts by eachof the regional bureausto improve program evaluation guidance, developprogram performance indicators, assist missionsin implementing program-levelmanagement and evaluation systems, andbetter apply program performance informationin mission and bureaudecision-making. During the past year, for example,the Africa Bureau has sentrepresentatives to nearly every mission to communicateDevelopment Fund for Africa (DFA)Action Plan priorities and help missionsformulate related country-levelstrategies and objectives. Similarly, the ANE bureauhas mounted a major technicalassistance effort to help missions developprogram performance indicators and information systems, while the LAC bureau has concentratedon expanding project monitoring and evaluation systems toassess "goal" and "purpose" achievements. Officeswith centralized program responsibilities--mostprominently Food for Peace and Women in Developmenthave initiatedsimilar efforts to better definecore program objectives and indicators and have begunproviding technical assistance to help missions developmore appropriate information systems forreporting progress. And, just within the past few months allof the Regional Bureaus have begun experimenting withnew "Program Impact Assessment" formats(replacing much unnecessary and underutilizedproject implementation reporting) andnew "performance-based budgeting"systems.

In 1989, A.I.D.'s central evaluationoffice (CDIE) beganmore closely examining these expanding effortsto evaluate program performance,develop program performance indicators, andmore strategically manage programs for development results.It quickly became apparent thatmost of these efforts were being developed piecemeal; lackedconsistency in orientation, methodology,or standards; and sometimes seemedto be primarily "paper planning"exercises intended to satisfy either A.I.D.executives or the Congress. By mid1989, in close collaboration with the regional bureausand other central offices, CDIEbegan providing more active leadershipand coordination by initiatingProgram Management and Evaluation Pilotsto develop model program performance information systems with twoor three selected missions in each region. 8

The program performance pilotsinvolve: (1) initial strategic planningand information needs assessments (toclarify mission program strategies,objectives, indicators, and information needs);(2) design and implementationof appropriate program performancemonitoring, reporting, andevaluation systems; and (3) assistance in applying programperformance information in missionmanagement and as a basis for upwardreporting to regional bureaus, seniorA.I.D. executives, and the Congress. These pilots arebeing implemented jointly, over a two tothree year period, bymission, bureau, and CDIE staff,assisted by outside contractors experienced in program managementand evaluation. Phase I of the programperformance pilots, which included program performance needs assessments andthe preliminary designof information systems in seven countries,has now been completed.During this same period, Management Systems International(CDIE's primary contractor for thisexercise) performed similar activities in 12additional missions, funded entirelyfrom regional bureau and mission sources.

Initial response to, and productsfrom, Phase 1 of the programperfor- mance pilots efforthave been very encouraging.The pilots have already yielded important lessons about how programperformance information can best be collected and most effectivelyused and have helped participatingmissions produce program strategies andevaluaCon plans (e.g., in Kenya,India, and Bolivia) that have been widelyheralded as Agency "models." The pilotefforts are also beginning to generate moreimmediately useful decision-makinginformation.

Much more, however, remains tobe done.Performance information Systems are still, for the most part, paperplans that must be implementedand replicated, and generate informationthat is actually used by mission,bureau, and senior managers.The exercise, however,already has a number of broader implications for A .I.D.'s evolvingdevelopment approach:

Evaluating program performance cannotsimply be reduced to monitoring country-wide politicaland economic trends. While M.D.'s program cannot bejudged successful in the long term unless economies are growing,societies are opening, and people are becomingmeasurably better off, such countrytrends, by themselves, tell us little about howA.1.D.'s programs actually contribute to development.This does not mean that A.1.D. should ignore larger developmenttrends, but rather that we cannot simply presume thatthese trends have resulted from A.I.D. initiatives.In evaluating programperformance we are assessing whether A.I.D. is infact achieving strategic objectives 9

that are strongly linkedto A.LD.'s interventions. It isin identify- ing and articulating furtherlinkages betweenprogram achieve- ments and country trends that the domains of economicanalysis and program evaluationultimately overlap. The evaluatwrforaiwrabl .im wit_h program planning and policy fo trm ilation. Program performance can only beevaluated in programareas where reasonably clear strategic objectives have already beenspecified or could be empirically delineated.The "program strategy" defines the framework forevaluation.Conversely, efforts to clarify performance measures quickly reveal the adequacy ofthe program strategy being assessed. And,a lack of program focus or a wide diversity in program emphasis across countriesis a good indication thatrelevant policiesare inappropriate or inadequate.

Although A.LD.'scountry programs are diverse,this diversity was somewhat less than expected.Conventional wisdom holds that each countryprogram is unique andcan only be assessed in its own terms. While our experience with performanceevalua- tion pilots revealed an enormous range in the breadthand character of country programs--from missionspursuing dozens of objectives with discreteprojects in nearlyevery conceivable sector to missions that concentrated nearly all of theirresources in an effort to achieve a single major goal, mostcountry pro- grams appear relatively well focused,with the bulk of activities oriented towards perhaps three to six strategic objectives.There also appears to be substantial consistency in the nature ofthese objectives across countries, withperhaps a dozen "core"program elements appe.iring again andagain.

Strategies and objectivesin some programareas are already definedfairlyclearly andcommon program performance indicators could be delineatedfairly, easily..In someprogram areas (such as population, childsurvival, and education), program objectives and interventionsappear to be quite similar across countries and regions,representing eithera single well defined strategy or a relatively small number ofalternatives.

Strategies and objectivesin other programareas, while not yet clearly articulated, are becoming more empiricallyexplicit in mission portfolios and (withappropriate pro_gram andpolicy 10 coordination) could _provide abasis for common program diverse, A.LD.'s performance indicators.Although initially quite activities in some newer areas,such as privateenterprise development and natural resourcesmanagement, appear tobe coalescing (partially as aresult of the performancepilots exercise) around a more limited setof interventions. Withappropriate provide a basis for program and policycoordination, this could delineated programstrategies and a set of common more clearly existin performance indicatois. Similar possibilities may emerging "political andeconomic freedom" areas. remain Strategies and objectivesin some other program areas perfor- quite diverse and thedevelopment of common program unless such iro rams mance indicatorswill remain uite difficult sharply focused. This appearsto be particularly can be more activities, which true for Agricultureand Rural Development represent the largestcomponent in A.1.D.'sdevelopment portfo- lio. Performance evaluation systems canand should be developed as mission management "nested hierarchies"which not only serve needs, but also provideuseful information for moresenior Management theory andpractice strongly decision-making. only viable I: suggests that hierarchicalinformation systems are decision-making needs atoperational levels. The they serve real is pilots suggest thatmuch performanceinformationthat immediately useful tomission managers isalso relevant to particularly in compara- bureau and seniormanagement needs, tively assessing countryperformance. for central, cross-cuttingprograms(such Measuring performance probably as W1D andFFP) presents specialproblems, which can combination of missionreporting and only be resolved through a and indicators for central studies.If strategies, objectives, programs likeW1D and FFP were moreclearly delineated, missions could providemuch more focusedperformance information, but in-depth orcomparative studies tointerpret this information would still need tobe managed bycentral program offices. initial success, the ... As CDIE's final Phase1 report suggests, "based on evaluation pilot effort] ...has the potential tofacilitate a [program performance and its more mature andresults-oriented dialrvuebetween A.1.D./Wfashington)

0 11

Missions and to provide amore substantive basis for reporting to Congressand the American people. At leastas importantly, initial evidence suggests thatthese benefits can be realized with enthusiasticparticipation rather than resistance from USAID Missions and canserve as structured opportunities for improvedprogram management and motivation."

IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL SCIENTISTS

These changes in A.I.D.'s foreignassistance strategy havea number of implications for anthropologists andother social scientists. While the demandfor social analysis skills will likelygrow (both in program design and evaluation) these skills will have to be combinedwith a greater facility for economicand political analysis (economic growth anddemocratization), on theone hand, and for management and organizationaldevelopment, on the other.It is no longer sufficient for anthropologists and othersocial scientists to be specialistsonly in indigenous cultures, they must alsobecome specialists in theeven more arcane cultures of A.1.D., other developmentorganizations, and host country bureaucra- cies.

In other words, an effective A.I.D.anthropologist in the 1990s will have to be a truly applied anthropologist.Such an anthropologist will beless concerned with traditional researchquestions, but muchmore able to translate anthropological knowledge and researchskills into meisurablymore effective economic development programs andthe management ystemsnecessary to make these developmentprograms work.

REFERENCES

Bissell, Richard E. 1989 Back to the Drafting Table:Has A.1.D. Outgrown the Foreign Assistance Act--Again.Foreign Service Journal, February 1989, pp. 34-38. 12

Britan, G., K. Byrnes, J. Mason,R. Thompson, and P. Vondal A Summary of Issues 1989 The Future of Foreign Assistance: and Annotated Bibliography.A.I.D. Evaluation Occa- sional Paper No. 18; Washington,D.C.: A.I.D.

Hellinger, Stephen, Douglas Hellinger, and Fred M. O'Regan 1988 Aid for Just Development:Report on the Future of Foreign Assistance. (The Development Group for Alternative Policies).Boulder, CO.Lynne Rienner Publishers.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Foreign Assistance to the 1989 Report of the Task Force on Committee on Foreign Affairsof the U.S. House of Representatives. (Hamilton Task ForceReport). Wash- ington, D.C., U.S. GovernmentPrinting Office (2/89).

Phoenix Group 1989 Reforms Needed inU.S. Assistance to Developing Countries.The International Trade andDevelopment Education Foundation.

Roskens, Ronald Washington, D.C.: 1990 Toward Strategic Management. A.I.D. (December 1990).

Smuckler, RalphH. and Robert J. Berg (withDavid F. Gordon) U.S. Cooperation 1988 New Challenges, New Opportunities: for International Growth andDevelopment in the 1990s. Center for Advanced Study ofInternational Develop- ment. East Lansing,Michigan: Michigan State Universi- ty.

Woods, Alan U.S. Economic 1989 Development and the National Interest: Assistance into the 21st Century.Washington, D.C.: HUMANIZING THE DEVELOPMENTPARADIGM

MARI H. CLARK'

Various development practitioners,academics, public interestgroups, and politicians are expressing growingdissatisfaction with themacroeconomic development paradigm that hasdominated foreign assistance inrecent years. Looking briefly back at theeconomic development models thatguided develop- ment assistance in the past,one finds a search for the crucial factor,the one button to push, to drive economicgrowth. In the 1920s itwas natural resources, then capital came into thelimelight. In the 1950s and 60sit was supply of entreprcueurial and managerial abilitiesand`T)ital investment (Granovetter 1990), and, in the 1980s, itwas macroeconorm.

Guided by this thinking,a fair amount of the delivery of foreign assistance focused on things (suchas infrastructure and markets) thatwere expected to stimulate economicgrowth rather thanon the people whose efforts also are essential to achieve andsustain such growth. Evenhouseholds were treated as things -black boxesthat maximize economic utility(Blumberg 1989, Folbre 1988, Hoben 1982, Wilk1989). Infrastructure, soil fertilityand seed varieties, markets, financial institutions,economic policies, and credit in alltheir complexity are still easier to dealwith than the diversity of humanbehavior.

And yet, there many examplesof development projects thatfloundered or failed because the human elementwas not taken into account adequately. This has been particularly thecase for culturally defined differencessuch as gender roles and ethnic identity, that affectpeople's economic constraints,opportunities, and incentives (see Blumberg1989).

13 14

A concern to re-introducethe human element intodevelopment thinking Adjustment with a Human Face is reflected in recentdevelopment reports such as (Cornia, Jolly, and Stewart1987) Engendering Adjustmentfor the 1990s (Common- 1990 World Bank DevelopmentReport which focused wealth Secretariat 1989), the The on poverty, andthe 1990 United NationsDevelopment Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report.It states: This report is aboutpeople - and about howdevelopment enlarges their choices.It is about more than GNPgrowth, more than income and wealth and morethan producing commodities and accumulating capital.A person's access to income maybe one of thechoices but itis not the sum total ofthe huma endeavor (UNDP 1990). have used For years, economists, politicians,and development planners within average per capitaincome as the measure ofthe status of development Seeking to modify theGNP approach, a UNDP teamof specific countries. in quantitative scholars created a "humandevelopment index" which assesses, terms, how people'slives are enriched orimpoverished as a result of access to their income; it also education, health care, anddemocratic freedom, as well as 1990, Gall 1990). takes into account the protectionof natural resources (UNDP development is also evident A greater concern forthe human element in "participatory development,"which is once again on the in the concept of points of discussion development discussiontable'. It was one of the major during meetings of the DonorAssistance Committee (DAC)of the Organization October and December for Economic Co-operationand Development (OECD) in of 1990. The need for more participatorydevelopment also appears in recent assessment argues that critiques of developmentassistance. For example, one development assisto.nce organizations areeffective to the extent that they: ...deliver assistance on a'hands-off" basis that appropriately complements ongoing or emergingself-development endeavors in the field; channelassistance directly to the poorthrough democratic developmentinstitutions whose roots extendinto the local community fabric;assist local groups in gainingthe resources and leverage necessaryto control their owndevelop- ment processes (Hel linger,Hel linger and O'Regan 1988). 15

Similarly, in a recent critique offoreign aid, Steven Browneinsists that the only way to achievesustainable human developmentis by enabling people to make their own lives better. "Theymust therefore be more fully participants in their own destinies, ableto articulate their needs, ableto make decisions that affect their lives, and ableto avail themselves of themeans for self-improvement" (Browne 1990: 148).

This stress on participatorydevelopment is net a returnto the human needs, welfare orientation of the1970s, discussed in the Introduction.In fact, one measure of effective development assistance,suggested at the OECD/DAC meetings noted earlier,was the extent to which it leaves peoplewith greater contrcl over their lives after theforeign resources have beensrent and the foreign consultants have gone home. TheDAC group concluded thatnew approaches were nemled to ensure that aid contributesmore decisively to effective economic policies, equitable access to resources, and broader publicparticipation in decision-making.

The Agency for InternationalDevelopment (A.I.D.) reportedto Congress on its multifaceted approach to povertyreduction in developing countries annual in its CongressionalPresentation, This respondedto the requirements of Section 593 of the FY 1990 ForeignAssistance Appropriation Act.A.I.D. poverty alleviation activitiesspan a wide range of areas suchas health, education and nutrition, export promotion,infrastxuctural development, andsupport for democracy. The report includes two types of poverty indicators: 1)measures of the dimensions of povertyin specific countries; 2)poverty reduction trends in relation to A.I.D.program objectives and assistance for specific 1991). countries (A.I.D.

The 1990s will bea critical decade during whichanthropologists and other social scientists can and should apply anthropologicaltheory and metho- dology to reshape and humanizethe development paradigm.In so doinc= they should ew,ure that gender, ethnic affiliation, or othersociocultural factor:,are not the basis for excludingor limiting participation inor access to the benefits of development assistance efforts.This humanizing focus is particularlyimportant as donor agencies direct increasing proportions of of their assistanceto national- level economic assistancetargeted to le erage nationalpolicy changes rather than projects targeted at specificgroups and needs.

Development practitionersare increasingly recognizing thatmarket dynamics alone are not enough to predict trends in developingeconomies or to assure the outcomes of policy reforms designed to strengthen thoseeconomies. Practical experience has shownthat "getting the prices right"is not enough to 16 economic growth. resolve economic crises andinitiate broad-based, sustainable, As a result, there isincreasing attention given tothe effects of the political economy of policyreform and the impact of thesereforms on poor households. includes the institutionalframework (legal The concern for the political economy players who enact and and regulatory mechanisms)and the politics of the implement policy and stand towin or lose from proposedreforms (Grind le and Thomas 1989, Reifenberg1990a).

In order to bring thehuman factor back into focus,it is very important economic and legal systems and to examine linkagesbetween the macro-level of the micro-level ofindividual and small groupeconomic decision-making. Attempts to analyze this linkage,such as the World Bank'sSocial Dimensions of Boyle in this volume), couldbenefit significantly Adjustment (SDA) project (see is an from anthropological conceptsand analysis. Particularlyimportant empirically based understandingof the knowledge, needs,and incentives that affect people's decision-makingin specific settings.

To establish these macro-microlinkages in a rigorous way,anthropolo- gists need to pursue thekind of "marriage" of economicsand anthropology that also Bates 1988, Scar lett Epstein discussed many yearsago (Epstein 1967; see political and policy Scherr 1988, and Schneider1988) along with a union with sciences (see Britan and Cohen1980). several critical In a broad sense, ananthropological perspective provides concepts for re-thinkingand humanizing thedevelopment paradigm. These include a focus on peopletheir beliefs and decisions, aswell as their actions; approach analyzing cross-culturalvariation and change over time; a comparative the market economy and a holistic perspective.That is, rather than dissecting fabric, as does traditionaleconomics, anthropology from its socio-political It examines the relationshipof the market to other aspectsof human endeavor. does so by borrowingand synthesizing analyticalconstructs from political science, economics, law, andother disciplines.

In a recent discussion ofwhat a "great work" indevelopment lnthropolo- like, Robert Bates stressedthe importance of its analysisof gy might look them; forms of state variations in: forms ofintervention and local responses to intervention; the ways institutionsaffect the ways in which peoplerespond to 'exogenous' shocks; the wayin which variations in thecharacteristics of local communities influence theform of public intervention(Bates 1988, pp. 83-84). Going beyond a basicanthropological perspective, there are many elements of specific anthropological constructsand models, incorporating economic, political and otherrelated theory, that could alsocontribute significant-

:13 17

ly to the re-shaping andhumanizing of the developmentparadigm. For example, as early as the 1950s, Eric Wolf demonstrated how institutional analysiscan serve as a means of tracing politico-economic macro-micro linkages and flows ofgoods, services, and information between local,regional, and national levelorganizations (Wolf 1955). Wolf and othersanal zed these linkages interms of mechanisms such as patron-client relationships (Wolf 1955), social networks(Barnes 1971), and marketing systems (Smith 1976).Frederic Barth's notion of "spheresof economic exchange" incorporating game theory and stressing the important of"transactions" is also relevant (Barth 1966).

The "gifts and poison" ofpolitical gamesmanship,discussed by F.G. Bailey also offers valuable insights for understanding thedecision-making of the winners and losers in economicreform (Bailey 1971). Carol of the relationship between Smith's examination types of market structures and thenature of the political organization in which they operate is also relevant(Smith 1976) asare studies on bureaucracies byscholars such as Gerald Britanand Ronald Cohen (1980), Alan Hoben (1980,1982), and Kathleen Staudt(1985, 1990).

More recently, anthropologistshave applied the concept of"transaction costs:3 taken from the"new institutional economics",to provide more rigor to the analysis of politico-economic relat;onships (Acheson andWilson 1989, Ensminger 1989). For example,James Acheson and James Wilsonhave recently developed a preliminary model ofthe growth of firms, combininganthropological and new institutional economics perspectives. They argue that socialfactors affect market efficiency and organizationalcosts which in turn affect capacityto use technology, capital, and humanresources (Acheson and Wilson 1989).

Anthropologists have also engagedin the studies and debatesabout the impact of structural adjustment on people. Some argue that adjustmentsin monetary policies, such as devaluation,increases in artificially low foodprices and interest rates, decreasesin government spending,wage freezes and elimination of subsidies providethe means to revitalizestagnating economies. Others claim that this isnot adequate and a structuraltransformation of the economy (i.e. the structure of demand andproduction) is needed. Stillothers insist that adjustment policiesignore reality at the villagelevel :n a manner that could cause more food crisesin Africa in the 1990s. For these of whom are farmers, 80 percent women, decreases in government spendingcould eliminate their opportunities for education and healthcare. Removal of subsidiesmay place fertilizer beyond their means, Structural Adjustment and AfricanWomen Farmers, edited by Christina Gladwinpresents evidence crom the varioussides of the debate (Gladwin 1991). 18

Michael Horowitz arguesthat anthropologistshave already made the understanding of thesocial, economic, and substantial contributions to the past 20 ideological dynamics of specific areasof development assistance over (Horowitz years, but theyhave been too modest aboutthese accomplishments 1988).5 In order to play a greaterrole in the development processdevelopment anthropologists need to followHorowitz' advice to promotetheir discipline's analytical wares. To contribute tothe humanization of thedevelopment assistance is essential also toplay a proactive and advocacyrole in the paradigm, it and development policy formulation, programdesign, performance monitoring, impact evaluation of the sortdescribed by the other authorsin this volume. This requires the kind of shiftfrom the academic role ofthe anthropologist as action-oriented roles that observer, analyst, and critic ofdevelopment assistance to enable changing the wayin which the developmentassistance system works. Michael Cernea advises the newcomerto developmentanthropology to "...be prepared to go beyond themythical role of 'data-providersfor decision-makers' designers" (Cernea and themselves becomepolicy formulators and program 1989:ii). Anthropologists need to applystrategic thinking to identify areas to focus more on necessary to affect inorder to redirect the development process expect to have people. They need to assesswhere and how anthropologists can advantage in doing so. Thestrategic points of interventionthat a comparative all emerge again andagain in the literature ondevelopment anthropology are: levels of policy-making(congressional, donor agency andhost country); program country-specific); and monitoring arievaluation. At design (agency-wide and formal and each of these points in thedevelopment assistance process there are informal systems andprocedures, roles andresponsibilities that must be understood as well as thespecific development problemsthat anthropological research can inform.'

Macroeconomist Sara Scherr advisesthe anthropologist that the way to influence policy is to "take theplunge" and draw policyconclusions from their research. She suggests that one reasoneconomists have dominated manypolicy analyze problems in debates is not the reliabilityof their data but their ability to the form - "if this happensthen that will happen" (Scherr1988:138-139).

In summary, to influence andshape development policy, programdesign, and evaluation to morefully integrate people into thedevelopment process, anthropologists need to use theirpolicy relevant findings alongwith an anthropological understanding ofthe bureaucracy of developmentassistance.

.1 ;) 19 In closing, it is also relevant to note the need, withinanthropology, to improve the dialoguebetween the so-called "applied" and "academic"branches of the discipline.Everyone recognizes thatthis is not "thinkers" and "doers" a distinction between or between elite ivorytower theorists and "quickand dirty" research "mercenaries".It is based on thetype of institution in which gist practice their discipline. anthropolo- However, then- is too oftena reluctance on the part of anthropologistsworking in academic institutions to recognizethat their colleagues who work outsideof academia havevaluable contributions to anthropological knowledge to make and theory. Similarly,anthropologists outside of academia too often questionthe usefulness new insights in anthropologicaltheory to their efforts "in thetrenches" of appliedanthropology. The concept of praxis,' embodying both theoryand action, shouldremind anthropologists of the dynamicpotential for more innovative analytical power to guide theory andmore development assistance thatcould result froma better dialogue between theuniversity and thedevelopment community. A model for such a dialogue is presented inRobert McC Netting's commentary on the papers inthis volume. Speakingfrom the university voice full of respect for with a development anthropology,he makes the pointthat "... analysis of how choices,preferences, and indigenous coping with new constraints institutions can andare and options isan indispensable contribution."This contribution is two-fold- to anthropological theory and also of development to the improvement assistance by practicinganthropologists.

NOTES

1. The author is a consultant to the Agency forInternational Development (A.I.D.) Office of Womenin Development,through Labat Anderson Incorporated. The viewsexpressed in this article They do not represent are those of the author. either the Agency forInternational Development or Labat Anderson, Inc.

3f; 20 participatory al.for a summaryof earlier work on 2. See Cohen et. Directions" legislationwhich is development stimulatedby the "New discussed in theintroduction to thisvolume. time, effort, and moneyrequired The term "transactioncosts" refers to the 3. information needed for asuccessful exchange,in for obtaining the the monetary costsincurred in contrast to "marketcosts", which refers to acquiring resources. of the "New (1985) for a detaileddiscussion and critique 4. See Granovetter to address theimportance institutional Economics"in terms of its failure of social relationsin institutionaltransactions. to whichanthropological Some examples ofspecific development areas 5. include: involuntaryrelocation, recolonization, studies have contributed organization to recurrentcosts and resettlement;the relevance of local the operation ofthe "informal sector";the nature of and debt repayment; class social organization;the relevance of age, urbanization and urban the and gender inrural production,exchange and consumption; production systems and tnerole of wage labor diversification of rural both on- and economies; ruralemployment generation, migration in rural linkages; the structureof user off-farm; marketingand rural-urban distributions and controlof water; thedevelopment of associations in the importance of the managementof "fragile lands"; central river basins; systems; afforestationand open-range accessin pastoral production common propertymanagement (Horowitz1988). important contributionsthat developmentanthropolo- 6. Hoben identifies contexts. Someexamples gists provide forprogramming and policy data from smallmeaningfully stratified include:providing reliable used to judge theplausibility of data thathave been samples that can be such as and sample surveytechniques for topics collected by census the land, factors affectingdemography; clarifying income, access to strategies that canonly be details of decision-makingprocesses and documenting the actual, asopposed to inferred from other sources; marketing, access to theoretical, constraints onproductive processes, by different groups;explaining credit, education orhealth services faced that are not obviousfrom a macroeconomic linkages between sectors interests, and strategiesof perspective; and outliningthe organization, (Hoben 1982:369). local elites andbureaucrats at all levels that one of the majorawards given tooutstanding 7. It is not by chance "Praxis Award." TheWashing- practicing anthropologistsis entitled the 21

ton Association of Professional Anthropologists,which established the award, stresses the notion of"practicing" anthropology ratherthan "applied" anthropology tode-emphasize the distinciton betweenacademic and nonacademic employment.The Association welcomesanthropolo- gists who practice anthropologyin all types of institutions.

REFERENCES Acheson, James and James Wilson 1989 Modernization and the Generation ofthe Firm: a Trans- actional Approach. Paper presentedat the 1989 Meetings of the American AnthropologicalAssociation. A.I.D. 1991 Creating Possibilities for PovertyReduction. A.I.D. Con- gressional Presentation FY 1992.Washington D.C.: A.l.D. Bailey, F.G. 1971 Gifts and Poison: the Politics ofReputation. New York: Schocken Books.

Barnes, J.A. 1971 Social Networks. Addison-WesleyModules in Anthrc.pol- ogy. Philippines: Addison-Wesley. Barth, Fredric 1966 Models of Social Organization.Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper No.23.London: Royal Anthro- pological Institute of GreatBritan and Ireland. Bates, Robert H. 1988 Anthropology and Development: ANote on the Struc- ture of the Field. In: Production andAutonomy: Anthro- pological Studies and Critiques ofDevelopment. John W. Bennett and John R.Bowen (eds.). Lanham MD: University Press of America. Pp.81-85. 22

Blumberg, Rae Lesser Gender Variable: Women and 1989 Making the Case for the the Wealth and Well-beingof Nations. WashingtonD.C.: U.S. Agency for InternationalDevelopment, Office of Women in Development.

Boyle, Philip the Challenge to 1990 Restructuring National Economies: Development Anthropology.Studies in Third World Societies 44:47-60.

Britan, Gerald Assistance. Studies in ThirdWorld 1990 The Future of Foreign et ics 44:1-12.

Britan, Gerald and RonaldCohen eds. Anthropological Perspectives on 1980 Hierarchy and Society: Bureaucracy. Philadelphia:ISHI Publications.

Browne, Steven York: New York University 1990 Foreign AID in Practice. New Press.

Cernea, Michael in the Nation's Capital. 1989 Foreword. Stalking Employment Washington D.C.: WashingtonAssociation of Professional Anthropologists. Pp. i-iii.

Cohen, John M. A Working Bibliography. 1978 Participation at the Local Level: Ithaca, New York: CornellUniversity Center for Interna- tional Studies.

Commonwealth Secretariat the 1990s: A Report of the 1989 Engendering Adjustment for Commonwealth Expert Group onWomen and Structural Ac:justment. London:Commonwealth Secretariat.

Cornia, Giovanni A., RichardJolly, and Frances Stewart Face. Vol. IProtecting the 1987 Adjustment with a Human Vulnerable and PromotingGrowth. Oxford: Clarendon. 23 Ensrninger, Jean 1989 The Persistence of Paternalismin an Otherwise Highly Contractual Labor Market AmongEast African Pastora- lists. Paper presentedat the 1989 Meetings of the Ameri- can Anthropological Association. Epstein, T.S. 1967 Data of Economics in AnthropologicalAnalysis. In The Craft of Social Anthropology.A.L. Epstein ed. London: Tavistock. Pp. 153-180.

Folbre, Nancy 1988 The Black Four of Hearts: Towarda Paradigm of House- hold Economics. In A HomeDivided: Women and Income in the Third World Work.Stanford U. Press. Gall, Peter 1990 What Really Matters: EllimanDevelopment. UNDP World Development 3(3):5-14). Gladwin, Christina ed. Structural Adjustment and AfricanWomen Farmers. Cainesville: University of FloridaPress. Granovetter, Mark 1985 Economic Action and SocialStructure: The Problem of Embedded ness. American Journalof Sociology 91 (3):481- 510.

1990 Entrepreneurship, Development,an the Emergence of firms. In Soci.,!ty and Economy.

Grind le, Merilee and John Thomas 1989 Policy Makers, Policy Choices,and Policy Outcomes: the Political Economy of PolicyReform in Developing Countries. Policy Sciences 22.

He !linger, Stephen. Douglas I lellinger,and Fred M. O'Regan 1988 Aid for Just Development:Report on the Future of Foreign Assistance. BoulderColorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers (for The DevelopmentGroup for Alternative Policies). 24

Hess, David for 1990 The Devekpment Fundfor Africa: Implications Anthropologists. Studies in Third WorldSocieties 44:135-146.

Hoben, Alan Annual Review of 1982 Anthropologists and Development. Anthropology 11: 349-375.

Horowitz, Michael Development Agenda. De- 1988 Anthropology and the New velopment AnthropologyNewsletter: 6(1):1988.

Reifenberg, Stephen of Policy Reform: Summaryof A 1990a The Political Economy Workshop. DevelopmentDiscussion Paper 328. Cam- bridge, Massachusetts:Harvard Institute for International Development. Economic Policy/Institutional 1990b Urban Labor Markets and Reform: Summary of aWorkshop. Development Discus- sion Paper 329.Cambridge, Massachusetts:Harvard Institute for InternationalDevelopment.

Schen, Sara J. Variables In Anthropologi- 1988 Incorporating Macroeconomic cal Research. In Productionand Autonomy: Anthropo- logical Studies and Critiquesof Development. John W. Bennett and John R. Boweneds. Lanham MD: University Press of America. Pp.125-142.

Schneider, Harold View Prom Anthropology. 1988 Principles of Development: a In Production andAutonomy: AnthropologicalStudies and Critiques ofDevelopment. John W. Bennettand John R. Bowen eds. LanhamMD: University l'ress ofAmerica. Pp.61-79.

Smith, Carol, ed. York: Academic Press. 1976 Rer,ional Analysis. New 25 Staudt, Kathleen 1985 Women, Foreign Assistance, and AdvocacyAdministra- tion. New York: Praeger.

Staudt, Kathleen, ed. 1989 Women, International Development, andPolitics: the Bureaucratic Mire. Philadelphia: TempleUniversity Press. UNDP 1990 The Human Development Report.New York: United Nations, UNDP. Vondal, Patricia 1991 Social and Institutional Analysis inthe African Economic Policy Reform Program andImplications for Future Analytical Needs. Studies in Third WorldSocieties. Wilk, Richard 1989 Decision-making and Resource Flows withinthe House- hold: Beyond the Black Box. In TheHousehold Economy. Richard Wilk ed. Boulder Colorado:WestviewPress. Pp.23-54.

Wolf, Eric 1966 Types of Latin American Peasantry:A Preliminary Dis- cussion. American Anthropologist 57.

World Bank, International Bank ForReconstruction and Development 1990 Poverty. The World DevelopmentReport. Washington D.C.: Oxford University Press.

1 r) ACTIONS OF THE U.S. CONGRESSTOWARD ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLEFOREIGN ASSISTANCE

KATY MORAN

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

As we enter anew decade and anticipate anew century, a perceived global environmental crisishas motivated the UnitedStates Congress to implement social, economic, andenvironmental change in orderto endow future generations with a more sustainableheritage. To achieve that end,the Congress recognizes that the U.S. must firstand foremost reform domesticpolicies. But also, during the 101st Congress, attempts to reauthorize the ForeignAssistance Act (FAA) offered the opportunity to reassess and redirectU.S. foreign policy priorities toward a more participaL ry and sustainabledevelopmentprocess (Smuckler et al 1988).

In an effort to clarify thepolicy process and to include gists in it, this more anthropolo- paper will identify some of the factorsthat influenced the environmental debate in Congressover attempts to reauthorize the FAA.I will describe studies andreports from congressional committeesand subcommittees that examined connectionsbetween development and theenvironment in U.S. foreign assistance, congressionalhearings at which scientiststestified on the threat of global change, andmedia attention that motivatedvoters and special interest groups to demand action from CapitolHill.

On another level of analysis,this paper will describe howand why a "Global Warming Initiative"for a U.S. foreign assistanceappropriation was developed and drafted ina particular congressional office inresponse to the

27 1 3 28 of the FAA(Goodenough1963; Bee1974; debate over reauthorization Warming Initiative", a tenmillion Weatherford, 1981; Moran1989). In the "Global (USAID) dollar appropriation tothe U.S. Agency forInternational Development the development of energyefficiency and renewable was included to encourage environmentally energy projects inthe Third World byfunding development of benign energy strategies. the process of changein Finally, using ananthropological perspective, did not get reauthorized Congress will be presented.How and why the FAA "Global Warming Initiative" was during the 101st Congress,but how and why the for the Subcommittee onForeign eventually incorporatedinto report language law will be discussed. Operations Appropriationand became public

INTRODUCTION "Understand the "Study up", Nader(1974) advised anthropologists, and responsibility areexercised in the United States". process whereby power because Kimball (1978) agreed,but felt few were activein the policy arena anthropologists have typicallybeen concerned:

...with remote peoples orin the past. The trashheaps of ancient civilizations, the bones ofancestral primates, orthe social climbing feasts of isolatedtribes may conceivablyyield some cosmic truths, but theycontribute little to explainingthe price of beans. (1981), who worked as acongressional staffer on However, Weatherford participate Capitol Hill, writes thatthe professional skillsfor anthropologists to already in place.In Tribes on the Hill,he describes in the policy process are anthropologists study in thefield similarities between remotesocial groups that the United States. "Likethe native politiciansbefore them, and policy makers in activities in the awesomenessof modern congressmen alsoclothe their political esoteric argot." ritual and ceremony,filled with fetishes and an study and describe theinstitutions, behavior, Basically, anthropologists look at a and values of groupsof humans in the pastand in the present. We and values, kinship andsocial group's economic andpolitical system, religion and ceremonies. 'This isdone by asking questionssuch organization, and rituals do they do it that as: What doGiese people do7 Howdo they do it? And, why the unique configurationof these and other factors way? When combined, (Chambers 1985). comprise what anthropologistscall the "culture" of the group

1 1 29

As social scientists, anthropologistsfollow the scientific method while conducting research, withone distinguishing difference. Whereas allscientists observe, anthropologists also participatein the activities being observed.As participant observers, we learn the languageand live with the subjectswe study and therefore are able to also addan insider's account to our research.

According to Weaver (1985), basicanthropo:Igical training and field methods offer unique perceptions thatcan be valuable to decision makers. The experience of living and working withother societies and culturessupplies credentials for anthropologistsas cultural interpreters. We can actas culture brokers and translateconcerns between those who formulate and implement federal policy and those who havea special interest in it or are affected by it.

Likewise, these skillsare also a means to learn more about the cultureof policy makers. Political decisionsand policy development usuallytake place in the legislative, executive,or judicial branches oi government in theform of statutes, executive orders, or court decisions,(Saffell 1981). Anthropologistsare trained to understand thestructure and the underlying values of theseorganiza- tions and how decisionsare made within an institutionalor bureaucratic surrounding.

Boggs (1990) describessome of the problems that anthropologistsmay encounter in the policy arena. He writeshow, as the natural sciences have matured, a conceptual convergence has resulted, but for the social sciences,a richer and more diverse pictureof things has becomeapparent. To many policy makers this represents valuable datathat adds greater dimensionsto the policy process; to others it simply adds confusion.

Colson (1985) reminds anthropologistsworking in the policyarea not to operate under the assumption thataccurate information is ameans to good policy, and that good policynecessarily leads to right action. Shewrites that for some policy makers, accuracy of information isassessed only by the degreeto which it supports establishedpositions in the politically chargedarena in which they operate.Colson feels that precisely becauseof anthropological insights, research results frequently threaten whatothers want to believe. With whatFirth (1981) has called "uncomfortableknowledge", anthropologists gather thekind of data that often challenges establishedcliches and puts in questionaccepted solutions and, consequently, thosewho champion them. 30

THE CULTURE OFCONGRESS Congress is the institutionalizedbody that the U.S. governmenthas change through authorized to respond to ournation's problems and to facilitate reflects our citizens' belief inthe concept of the legislative process. This process it progress -- that ournation's destiny can becontrolled, as well as altered when policy has authority and becomes necessary toredirect it. However, existing legitimacy because it is theproduct of specific social andhistorical decisions that Therefore, policy change represents workable andstabilizing links with the past. is typically cautiousand incremental.

Resistance to change is balancedby the fact that our countryis composed of constituencies withfrequently conflicting social of a complex kaleidoscope constituencies, and the policy values. The Congress wascreated to represent all values. process providesthe stage to act outconflicts between opposing Participation in the legislativepolicy process requires anunderstanding rules of Congress, as well asimplicit cues and informal of the formal and explicit procedures, are employed standards for behavior. Formalrules, or congressional available to members duringfloor to define, restrict, orexpand the pclicy options affect the outcome ofpolicy. According to Oleszek debate, and consequently deliberation, collegial (1984), "The proceduralrules of Congress encourage decision making, dissent, openness,participation and accessibility."

The legislative process istightly linked to congressionalprocedures and typical of democratic reflects the messiness,pragmatism, and compromise so procedural rules because policy making. Often, policydecisions are expressed as face Congress defy simple yes or nodecisions during the complex issues that priority debate. Procedures can preventconsideratdon of some issues and grant with procedural expertise canshape legislation to their ends; to others. Members trying to pass or defeat they become shepherdsfor congressional coalitions legislation. Informal rules such as precedentsand folkways also are a partof the not expressed as formalrules; they represent culture of Congress. Precedents are decisions on matters of the "common law" ofCongress or accumulated past procedure. Folkways are unwritten normsof behavior that members areexpected Senate folkway is the to learn and practiceby observation. For example, one "courtesy" that memberspractice by avoiding publicattacks on the character of by folkways are rewarded Senate colleagues duringdebate. Members who abitle violate the customs of with increased influence inthe policy process; those who Congress often find theirlegislation blocked in committee or onthe floor. 31

Members of Congress haveresponsibilities other than and foremost of these is lawmaking; first to represent the district and theconstituents who sent them to Washington, and who,in the next election, couldalways elect someone else. Responding to constituentinterests subjects membersto steady and unrelenting pressures to understand diverse, controversial andcomplicated issues and to action to helppass or block legislation affectingthe issues. Since congressional procedures requirebills to pass througha maze of decision points before they can become law,a constant cycle of congressionalcoalition building is necessary. Eachstep of the legislative process must be shepherded bya winning coalition tocarry a policy recommendationupie next rung of the legislative ladder. While some coalitions are formed to advancelegislation, others are formed to block it, so shiftingcoalitions dissolve and recombinein response to the widely varying issuesthat are addressed in different committees and subcommittees. congressional

Oleszek (1984) writes that ofthe 13,000 to 29,000measures that have been introduced in each Congress since 1965, the number emergingfrom committee in any one Congress has never exceeded4,200. The number thatwas reported out of committee and eventuallybecame public law hasnever exceeded 810. It is in the congressional committee that the winnowingprocess for legislation occurs. Bills that havelittle support die if they failto be reported out of the committee of jurisdiction to which they havebeen referred. Popular, often called "sexy" bills, are expedited through Congress byprocedures. Major bil's that are controversialare often reintroduced and debated Congresses. through many

Responsibility for substantiveand policy-making actionin Congress belongs to authorizing committeeswhich propose solutionsto public problems and advocate for appropriations for new and existing legislation.Appropriations committees recommend howmuch federal agencies andprograms will receive in relation to fiscal resources and economic conditions.Technically, authorization bills are supposed to beenacted before appropriations,but when passage of authorization bills has not occurred, appropriations bills are passedwithout them through the use of congressionalprocedures.

Although each committee hasjurisdiction over certain subjectmatters, contemporary problems tend to haverepercussions in manyareas so jurisdiction frequently overlaps. Thedecentralized nature ofcongressional decision-making is reinforced by overlapping jurisdiction, and manycommittees can bring their expertise to bear on complex,controversial issues suchas the United States Foreign Assistance Act of1961 (Nowels 1988; Britanet al 1989; Woods 1989). 32

THE FOREIGN ASSISTANCEACT

Foreign aid as a nationalpolicy for the United Statesoriginated with the U.S. economic supporthelped to rebuild Europe at Marshall Plan in 1947 when changed from Europe to the end of World WarII.The focus of foreign aid the 1950s when theU.S. Agency for International developing countries during economic assistance by an Development (USA1D) wascreated to implement U.S. the first country to offer amendment to the ForeignAssistance Act. The U.S. was economic assistance as anational policy, and remainedthe leader in dispensing the U.S. in disbursementsof absolute amounts until1989 when Japan surpassed economic aid. has totaled over Since its inception, Americaneconomic and military aid nations. The Foreign AssistanceAct $950 billion (FY89dollars) to more than 100 at political compromise and its appropriationslegislation represents an attempt to promote a wide rangeof key U.S. competingpriorities such as security, through many special political, and economicand humanitarian interests provisions and earmarks. Foreign assistance is amajor tool of Americanforeign policy and interest group pressures andfrequent controversy therefore is subject to special budget and debate over its goalsand its costs. Recently,the foreign assistance disagreement between theexecutive and the legislative has generated substantial of Congress to earmark, or branches, particularly overthe continuing practice Congress regards earmarks as a means protect, importantforeign aid recipients. foreign policy priorities and as alegitimate exercise of Congressio- to establish its however, views earmarks as a nal management of thebudget. The President, method to undermine hisflexibility and to forcesubstantial reductions for countries that arc notprotected (Nowels 1988).

Congress reviews the President'sforeign aid request through acomplex formally requires both theauthorization and jurisdictional network that the case appropriation of funds. For most programs,this is done annually or in sometimes biannually. Nosingle committee orsubcommittee of authorizations, single has total jurisdiction overall foreign aid programs,and consequently, no foreign assistance budget.The House Foreign Affairs bill will contain the entire responsibility for and Senate Foreign RelationsCommittees assume most of the and Senate ForeignOperations authorizinglegislation, while the House Subcommittees have primaryjurisdiction over appropriationsmatters.

4 5 33

On October 17, 1986, theHouse Committeeon Science, Space and Technology and its Subcommitteeon Natural Resources, Agriculture Research and Environment requested a study from the Office of TechnologyAssessment (OTA) of the U.S. Congress. Therequest was for an OTA exploratorystudy to investigate how aid agencies mightimprove their capabilitiesto match technolo- gies to local environmental conditions of recipient developingcountries. Several other committees suggested thatthis OTA paper mightserve as a resource for oversight and reauthorizationhearings of the FAA.

The request grew out ofan earlier study conducted under theauspices of the Environmental andEnergy Study Institute(EESI) and ten Members of Congress. The EESI studyidentified the mismatch oftechnologies with developing country environmentsas a common contributingcause of develop- ment assistance project failures (Officeof Technology Assessment StaffPaper 1987).

The conclusion of the OTAstudy was not surprising-- that the use of ecologically appropriatetechnologies is crucial todeveloping countries in stabilizing their fragile economies.Damage to the resource basecan be critical, as lesss developed countries ultimatelydepend on naturalresources for develop- ment and they lack the fundingto implement restorationor reclamation of natural resources.

Likewise, an October, 1988,U.S. General Accounting Office(GAO) recommended that Congress andthe Administratioi, revise theFAA to clarify priorities that USAID shouldaddress in the 1990s. Oneissue that the GAO prioritized was environmentaldegradation (U.S. GAO 1988).

"Sustainable Development andNatural Resources: A Strategyfor U.S. Foreign Assistance" isa 1988 report to Congress horn theSecretary of State (U.S. Dept. of State 1988). The report, compiled by the StateDepartment's Bureau of Oceans and International Environmentaland Scientific Affairs,was submitted in response to Section 537 (k) of the ForeignOperations AppropriationsBill (Public Law 100-202).

The report opens by citing Werld Bank President, BarberConable:

...our fight against global poverty...ourcommitment to environ- mental protection...arenot just consistent. Theyare interdepen- dent. Sustained developmentdepends on managingresources, not exhausting them. Economicgrowth based onany other premise is a costly illusion (Conable1987). 34

A conclusion of the report wasthe need to supportinstitution building in aid channeled specificallytoward strengthening the developing countries through protection and resource role and capacity of existingindigenous environmental management agenciesabroad. The report states: Experience in the U.S. showsthat these organizationsoften play identifying problems orrisks from projects or a key role in Many of policies and help identifyviable alternative approaches. funded by the the environmentallyharmful aspects of projects multilateral development banks(MDBs) were first spotlightedby U.S. based non-governmentalorganizations (NG0s). Their identification of problems andtheir public activism aimed at policy revision havefrequently resulted in positivechange in Third World developmentprojects (U.S. Dept. of State1988, p. 9).

It was further reportedthat, because of theirvested interest, NGOs in borrowing countries often have agreater commitment,knowledge and under- cultural factors at standing of local environmentalconditions and of social and immediately affected project sites, and can representthose groups that are most by projects. The official response ofthe House ForeignAffairs Committee was to Task '-'orce on ForeignAssistance to undertake amajor organize a bipartisan chaired by Reps. Lee review of the U.S. foreignassistance program which was The objective of the taskforce was to examine Hamilton and Benjamin Gilman. Its target was to what role foreign aidplays in various internationalissues. re-write the ForeignAssistance Act of 1961 thioughthe first comprehensive review of the act by thecommittee since 1975. TheTask Force identified four objectives, one of which wasenvironmental principle foreign assistance to be debated sustainability. Many otherrecommendations which continue emerged from the Task Forcealso (House ForeignAffairs Committee 1989).

The next step in the process was arash of Congressionalhearings on the held so that members impact of development onthe environment. Hearings are groups, academic experts of Congress and of theexecutive branch, special interest publicly express their opinions onthe merits or faults and concerned citizens can demonstrable and permanent of a particular bill orissue. Witnesses supply a public record of inquiry anddeclaration of positions on anissue. howad At every hearing onforeign assistance, eachwitness used the At this point, it should "sustainable development" atleast once in their testimony. unusually dry, hot summer of1988 motivated voters to write be noted that the counteract theimpending to their representativesand demand action to

5 i 35

possibility of climate change generated by increasedconcentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Featurecover stories by Time, Newsweek, and other publications further influenced Members to respondto what was perceived as a global environmental crisis.

During the most significant hearing,on June 23, 1988, James H. Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies,made international headlines. Hansen stated before the Senate's Energy Committeethat there was a "99% chance that the unusually warm globallyaverage temperature records he and a colleague had constructed for the 1980s couldnot have occurred by chance, but rather, were the result of the buildup ofgreenhouse gases" (Hansen 1988). Hansen's statement alerted the world to theimminence of climate change and generated recognition of the need to lessen worldwidedependency on the fossil fuels that increase the buildup of greenhousecausing gases in the atmosphere.

On February 21, 1989, the Foreign Operations,Export Financing, and Related Programs Subcommittee of HouseAppropriations held a hearingon environmental issues as related to foreign assistance.One witness, Assistant Secretary of State, Frederick M. Bernthal, statedin his testimony, "Global climate change may well become the dominant foreign policyissue of the 21st century" (Bernthal 1989).

At the same hearing, the testimony of Robert H.Williams, senior research scientist at Princeton's Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies offered promising energy strategies for the U.S.to cope with global warming at home and to direct aid policy abroad. Williams recommendedenergy efficiency, the use of natural gas during a transition toa post-fossil fuel era, and modernizAion of biomass and other renewablesas energy source.

THE GLOBAL WARMING INITIATIVE

From 1987 through 1989 I was employed in the officeof a member of the U. S. House of Representatives Foreign OperationsSubcommittee of Appropria- tions. The jurisdiction of this subcommittee includesfunding for U.S. foreign assistance. As legislative assistanton this Congressman's staff, I was responsible for international environmental issues, particularlythose issues that included economic development.

Our office was in liscussionson global warming with the many environment and development NGOs that recentlyhave developed new agendas for action and new images andproactive roles within their organizations' 36 mandates. In the recent past, therole of NG0s, also referred to asPVOs (Private Voluntary Organizations), was tofill the gap left by the governmentand the private sector in humanitarianadvocacy. Today, their proactiveroles include representing the grass-roots aslobbyists, both domestically andinternationally. Lobby groups are pressure groupsthat operate both at the grassroots level to stimulate public debateand influence public opinionand in direct contact with congressional offices.They perform indispensablefunctions and provide technical information producedby research and experience ontheir special interest. Lobby groups articulatepractical aspects of an issue such aswhich interests the issue would helpand which interests it wouldhurt, and options and compromises available. However, agroups' power to influencelegislation often is based less on its argumentsthan on the size of its-membership,the amount of financial manpower it can commit tolegislative lobbying campaigns andthe astuteness and sophisticationof the organizations' representatives.

Many observers of Congressrightfully point out that interest groups may, in pursuing their own objectives,lead the Congress into decisionsthat benefit public as a only a particular pressure groupbut do not necessarily serve the whole. Recognizing the needs ofdeveloping countries, our officeassessed the credibility of the environmental anddevelopment NGOs that we workedwith by their degree of support fortheir counterparts in developingcountries. This was demonstrated by the financial,technical, and information resourcesthey supplied that contributed to building theinstitutions of fragile indigenousNGOs abroad. In many offices on CapitolHill, these actions demonstratecredibility of the commitment of NGOs to theirspecial interest (Nagle 1987;Dobson 1989; Third World Network 1990).

In 1983, the Directory of U.S.Non-Profit Organizations inDevelopment Abroad listed over 497 organizationsinvolved in development issues(World Resources Institute nd). Likewise,the growing eavironmentalcommunity today includes a multitude of organizationsthat have differing agendas toaddress the environmental problems that arereported daily in newspapers andjournals (Grupenhoff 1989; NationalWildlife Federation 1990; WorldWIDE1990). According to Brookes (1990),environmental NGOs are thewealthiest and most powerful, with a $235 million operatingbudget for the "Big Ten" most established groups. As they moveinto advocacy and lobbying,environmental NGOs are perceived as a real threat to "BigOil" and other conflicting specialinterests that previously were the only well-financedlobbys on the H./I.

However, various perceptions andprejudices often have pitted develop- ment and environmentalcommunities against each other.Environmentalists have been perceived as "elitists moreconcerned with rare birds and virginlandscapes 37 than with poor people", while environmentalistsoften view development assistance specialists "in the cloak of their old domesticantagonist, the economic developer" (World ?esources Institute nd).

Understanding the relationships between andamong these NGOs, during 1988 and 1989 our office initiated informaldiscussions with them (Edy et al 1978; Chambers 1985). Our agendawas to discover common goals, values, and interests that unite NGOs in their efforts toensure the survival and health of the natural resource base used to alleviate poverty (Heighton 1978). Ourgoal was to persuade them to act together in developinga response to the predicted global change chat could be implemented in theFAA. Population pressurewas recognized as a major factor in all efforts,and represented in the discussions by both environment and developmentgroups.

Out of the discussions emergeda consensus that the need for a new direction in energy policy for foreignassistance was cross cutting and couldnot be addressed in isolation by eithergroup. Discussions disclosed that since energy is a central requirement forevery kind of economic activity, the power sectorcan be the crucial area for U.S. foreign aidto influence a country's development strategy. Additionally, environmental impacts fromsupporting non-renewable energy are pervasive, particularly in the release of carbondioxide into the atmosphere through fossil fuel combustion.Since the supply of fossil fuels is finite, over-use will threaten expandingfuture generations throughpoorer prospects for energy independence and greaterrisks than our own generation. These factors threaten the public healthand national security of developing countries, and, on a larger scale, the helathand security of the world.It was agreed that one option for U.S. policy shouldbe to reflect environment and development concerns by dispensingenergy aid thatissustainable and environmentally benign. An emphasis wouldalso be placed on promotingenergy efficiency.

With the focus of energy efficiency andrenewables, our next taskwas to initiate participation of NGOs in planningthe direction of the "Global Warming Initiative". Biomass became the renewableenergy of choice, as we decided foreign assistance could be better leveraged in supportingan energy source that required proper management and offered many indirect benefits. Thistype of development has the advantage of capitalizingon local resources including land, labor, and financing; consequently it creates lessdependency on foreign investment (Moran 1987).

In drafting the initiative,we worked with, among others, the Biomass Users Network (BUN), a consortium offifty or so developing countrygovern- ments and NGOs with an interest in biomassproduction. BUN was established

5:1 38 as a network to promoteSouth-South cooperation in increasingproduction and use of biomass resourcesin participating areas in Africa,Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean.The BUN approach is to first assistdeveloping countries in identifying their biomass resources,and then to help them plan and implement development programs.Projects are recipient-led, and usersbenefit from the increased fl^w of technical,economic, sodal, political, institutionaland environmental information thatinfluences the shape and score ofdevelopment efforts (Biomass Users Network1988).

The Subcommittee on ForeignOperations of House Appropriations began writing its report and bill languagein 1989 and included our "GlobalWarming Initiative". The report of a committeeis a narrative statement thataccompanies a bill to describe its purposeand scope and to justify committeeactions in reporting the bill.The report stated that the Committeefound AID's energy efforts needed expansion. Itrequired AID to commit a $10 millionappropriation in FY90 to its Office of Energyfor energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. It directedAID's Office of Energy, in cooperationwith country missions, to assist countries in developingand implementing energy plansthat employ end-use analysis to identify costeffective actions to minimize reliance onfossil fuels. These plans, the report stated,should include an analysis of theeffects of alternative energy systems and end-use energyefficiency on levels of greenhouse gas emissions. The reportfurther stated that whenever possible,NGOs and academic institutions should beinvolved in the preparation of theseplans. The Committee also recommended thatAID fund innovative technologiessuch as biomass energy systemsethanolproduced from sugarcane and corn as a substitute for petroleum. The appropriations process wasproceeding, with NGOs successfully lobbying the subcommittee to formcoalitions to support our initiative.However, the authorizing committees, ForeignAffairs in the House and Foreign Relations in the Senate, were not proceeding.This was not unanticipated, since formal congressional procedures for reviewingthe foreign assistanceprogram have broken down significantly in the past12 years. It reflects the pattern of the80s of failure to reach a consensus onpriorities forhe U.S. foreign assistance program for importantU.S. interests in developing countriessuch as economic growth and poverty alleviation.Global issues such as debt, the environment, drugs, and AIDS have emerged inthe last decade (Moran 1991).

The House foreign aid legislationincluded recommendations by the Task Force, and passed its authorizing bill onJune 29, 1989 (H.R. 2655). However,the Senate failed to pass its FY90authorization (S 1347), and fhe appropriationsbill, rather than authorization legislation,passed as a free-standing foreign aid appropriation (PL 101-167).

:PT) 39

In its FY89 report language, theAppropriations Committeewrote that it expected that appropriations aboveFY89 levels would fundexpansion of existing projects which provide assistanceand training for thepromotion of energy efficiency and renewable energy. The initiative has continuee intothe Foreign Operations, Export Financing, andRelated Programs Act for FY91 of June 25, 1990, FY91's (H.R. 5114). As foreign aid appropriationearmark requires AIDto allocate thirty million dollars fora Global Warming Initiative designedto identify "key (developing) countries" that can be expectedto contribute significantlyto climate t hange in thenear future, and to design energy conservationand forestry programs that would promote stableeconomic development whilereducing greenhouse emissions.

In the FY91 appropriation,the subcommittee expandedthe use of energy efficiency and renewablesto include the World Bank andother multilateral development banks. Much of thelanguage in the appropriationis designed to maintain pressure on the banks to insure that current environmentalpolicies are implemented and practices improved.The appropriation stresses theneed for the World Bank to promote end-useenergy efficiency, conservation, and renewable energy techniques. The committee'sreport also includes language directing to set up an energy project preparation AID facility to provide the bankswith possible energy programs that would enable thebanks to playa more proactive environmental role.

I close by restating what Isaid in the introduction ofthis paper, but which bears repeating andis directly quoted from theappropriations report language:

The Committee finds...that globalwarming due to the accumula- tion of greenhousegases in the atmosphere isa serious and growing threat to the securityand welfare of the UnitedStates and the world, and thatclimate change could be thegreatest environmental challenge humanityhas ever faced...

The Committee isespecially concerned thatwhile industrialized countries...areresponsible for most of the humanly induced greenhousegases that reach the atmosphere, developing account for over 30% of current carbon dioxide(CO2) emissions through the burning of fossilfuels and the widespreaddestruc tion of tropical forests. The Committeealso notes that the Third World's share of CO2 emissions isexpected to riseover 50% by the middle of the nextcentury. U.S. economic assistancemust focus on energy and forestryactivities which promoteeconomic M.

40

development while reducinggreenhouse ga emissions."(Com- mittee on Appropriations1989 p. 17)

CONCLUSIONS Our congressional office wasable to pass the "GlobalWarming Initiative", the FAA continued to be and as the 102nd Congressopened, reauthorization of discussion and frequent controversyamong congressional the subject of extensive vested interest in the committees, governmentagencies, and lobbies with outcome. Perhaps these groupscould be well-served intheir efforts through an Anthropologists recognize that welive in, and anthropological perspective. there are many views of indeed nurture, a complexsocial environment in which value systems to support thediffering views. Anthropolo- the cosmos with many respond to a policy as gists are trained to learnwhy a certain constituency may it does, and to craftoptions to reconcile differingvalues. goals and To reinvigorate the debateduring the 102nd Congress, common the FAA magnified to support values must be identified,and the constituency for collaborative action. The FAAcannot respond to everyinterest the foundation for interwoven threads in thefabric a an group until it isrecognized how issues are the international responseof the Iraqi in, asion interdependent world. Recently, dependency and its of Kuwait has violentlybrought home the force of energy politically charged intcrnational impact on all othersocioeconomic sectors in the arena. be made that highlightshow these issues are A strong case must national interests and interrelated, as well as theconnections between U.S. of the Third World. Onlythen will the act be adopted sustainable development interest by U.S. voters as thepoint of maximumleverage to implement U.S. globally.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Rep. John Porter The author gratefullyacknowledges the assistance of Riall Nolan; Gerald M. (R-IL) and Kathryn CameronPorter; Thomas E. Lovejoy; Britan; and Larry Q.Nowels.

r1 41

REFERENCES Bee, Robert L. 1974 Patterns and Processes: AnIntroduction to Anthropologi- cal Strategies for the Studyof Sociocultural Change.New York: The Free Press.

Bernthal, Frederick, AssistantSecretary of State

1989 Testimony before theSubcommittee on ForeignOpera- tions. Washington, DC: HouseAppropriations Commit- tee.

Biomass Users Network 1988 Network News. Washington,DC.: Biomass UsersNet- work.

Boggs, James P. 1990 The Use of AnthropologicalKnowledge Under NEPA. Human Organization. Vol.49, No. 3: Fall. Britan, Gerald e' il 1989 The Future of ForeignAssistance: A Summary ofIssues and Annotated Bibliography(A.I.D. Evaluation Occasion- al Paper No. 18) Washington,DC: U.S. Agency for In ternational Development. Brooks, Warren 1990 Greener Grows the Network.Washington Times, April 17, P. F4.

Chambers, Erve 1985 Applied Anthropology; APractical Guide. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Colson, Elizabeth 1985 Using Anthropology ina World on the Move. Human Organization. Vol. 44, No. 3:Fall. Committee on Appropriations 1989 Foreign Operations ExportFinancing, and Related Programs AppropriationsBill, 1990. Washington,DC: Committee on Appropriations.

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Conable, Barber Resources Institute.Washington, 1987 Address to the World DC.

Dobson, Chad Social Destruction".Washing- 1989 "Funding Ecological and ton, DC: BankInformation Center.

Grupenhoff, John T. Environment. Bethesda: 1989 CongressionalDirectory: Grupenhoff Publications,Inc..

Goodenough, Ward H. New York: Russell SageFoun- 1963 Cooperation in Change. dation.

and William S.Partridge Eddy, Elizabeth M. in America. New York:Columbia 1978 Applied Anthropology University Press.

Firth, Raymond Reflections on Applying 1981 Engagement and Detachment: Social Anthropology toSocial Affairs. HumanOrganiza- tion. Vol. 39.

Heighton, R. H., Jr. andC. Heighton Social Policy. InElizabeth M. Eddy andWilliam L. 1978 New Partridge eds., AppliedAnthropology in America. York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Hansen, James E. Effect: Impacts onCurrent Global 1988 The Greenhouse Temperature and RegionalHeat Waves. SenateCommit- Washington, DC: tee on Energy andNatural Resources. U.S. Senate.

Committee House Foreign Affairs Force on ForeignAssistance to the 1989 Report of the Task Committee on ForeignAffairs U.S. House ofRepresenta- Washington, DC: tives (HamiltonTask Force Report). U.S. GovernmentPrinting Office (PN-ABB-596). 43

House Foreign Operations AppropriationsBill 1987 Public Law 100-202.

Kimball, Solon T. 1978 Anthropology as a Policy Science.In Applied Anthro- pology in America. E.M. Eddy andWilliam L. Partridge (eds.). New York: Columbia UniversityPress. Moran, Katy 1991 Debt for Nature Swaps: U.S.Policy Issues and Options. Renewable Resources Journal.Spring.

1989 Congress. In Adam Koons, BeatriceHackett, and John P. Mason eds., Stalking Employmentinthe Nation's Capital: A Guide for Anthropologists.Washington, DC: The Washington Association ofProfessional Anthropolo- gists.

1987 Traditional Elephant Managementin . Cultural Survival Quarterly: Grass-rootsEconomic Development 11 (i): Pp. 23-26. Nader, Laura 1974 Up the Anthropologist-PerspectivesGained from Study- ing Up. In D. Hymer, ed.,Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Random House.

National Wildlife Federation 1990 Conservation Directory 1990.Washington, DC: National Wildlife Federation. Nagle, Bill (ed.) 1987 NGO Networker. Number I,Sept.Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Nowels, Larry Q. 1988 Foreign Assistance Budget andPolicy Issues (CRS Report 1888056). Washington, DC: TheLibrary of Congress.

Office of Technology Assessment(OTA) Staff Paper 1987 Aid to Developing Countries: TheTechnology/ Ecology Fit. Washington, DC: OTA,Congress of the United Sta tes.

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Oleszek, Walter J. the Policy Process (Second 1984 Congressional Procedures and Edition). Washington, DC.:Congressional Quarterly Press.

Saffell, David C. Politics and Public Policies. 1978 State and Local Government: Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley.

Smuckler, Ralph H. andRobert J. Berg with David F.Gordon 1988 New Challenges, NewOpportunities: U.S. Cooperation for International Growth andDevelopment in the 1990's. East Lansing: MichiganState University Centerfor Advanced Study of InternationalDevelopment.

Third World Network Malaysia: Consumers' 1990 Third World Network. Penang, Association of Penang.

U.S. Department of State Natural Resources: A 1988 Sustainable Development and Strategy for U.S. ForeignAssistance. Washington, DC: Dept. of State.

U.S. General AccountingOffice Issues Affecting Economic 1988 Foreign Aid: Problems and Assistance (PC-AAA-110).Washington, DC: GAO.

Weatherford, J. McIver Rawson, Wade. 1981 Tribes on the Hill. New York:

Weaver, Thomas Part 11, Development 1985 Anthropology as a Policy Science: and Training. HumanOrganization. Vol. 44, No. 3: Fall.

Woods, Alan Interest: U.S. Economic 1989 Development and the National A ssisti into the 21st Century(PN-ABB-942). Washing- ton, DC JSAID. 45 World Resources Institute nd Making Common Cause: AStatement and Action Plan by U.S.- Based Development,Environment, and Popula- tion NG0s. Washington, DC:World Resources Institute. WorldWIDE 1990 WorldWIDE Directory ofWomen in Environment. Washington, DC: WorldWIDE. RESTRUCTURING NATIONALECONOMIES: THE CHALLENGE TO DEVELOPMENTANTHROPOLOGY

PHILIP BOYLE

INTRODUCTION

Many of the less-developed nations ofAfrica, Latin America, and Asiaare currently engaged in significantrestructuring of their economies. Themajority of these programs are linked to InternationalMonetary Fund anu World Bankpolicy conditionality (economic policy reformsin exchange for quick-disbursingloan tranches), and their success has variedconsiderably. Nonetheless, thereis widespread belief that significantmacropolicy reform was not onlynecessary by the mid-1980s but a matter ofsome urgency. Moreover, recent events in Poland and the Soviet Union indicate thateconomic adjustmentprograms are not limited to the Third World.

The initial step taken to rectifythe chronic macroeconomicimbalances characterizing the developing world afterthe second oil price shock in 1979was to employ the traditional balance ofpayments stabilization measures promoted by the IMF. These stressedsubstantial stand-by loan facilitiesin exchange for rather draconian attemptsto redress the balance in governments'external and internal deficits. Devaluation ofthe local currency, cuts ingovernmental expenditures, and restriction of themoney supply and credit threwmany economies into severe recession. Whilemost restructuring countries continueto run serious current account deficits, stabilizationhas managed to accomplish its major objective of reversingan accelerating slide into greatly reducedor negative economic growth.

47 f; 2 48 While some of the causesunderlying the economiccrisis of the developing world in theearly 1980s were external,such as falling commodity perceived by the multilateral prices, the oil price shocks,and drought, most were result from an impropermix of internal economicpolicies. financial institutions to had become overly These policies, howeverwell conceived in earlier years, protectionist and incapableof adapting to a rapidlychanging international international competition, economic environment.Artificially sheltered from identified with the public sector,found themselves unable country elites, largely to provide for therapidly to generate thelevel ot economic growth necessary growing consumption needsof their populations. In order to address thelonger-term policy reform needsof developing renewed growth necessary toend countries, which wouldeventually generate the provide for internal socialdevelopment, the World Bank trade imbalances and macroeconomic balance designed special lendingfacilities aimed at re-establishing developing countries. Thesestructural adjustment and sectoral growth in many stabilization programs normallyfollow or occur in tandemwith IMF stand-by facilities. At first perceived as animportant, if shcrt-lived,dose of structural transformation, the use of policyreform conditionality inforeign assistance, has begun to have severaleffects. have undergone an erosionof their (1) Many developing countries sovereignty with respect tothe industrialized economies,and the question of potential indefinitedependence of their governments on externalassistance has been raised. ofvarious (2) Many economists andother developmentalists disciplines have begun togain experience in designingpolicy from the mixes for national economiesand have begun to learn results of their experience. including economists, havebegun to (3) Many social scientists, question the assumptionsand models in use by thedesigners of of policy conditionalityparticularlytheir lack of understanding the local political andsocio-cultural realities conditioningthe population impacts of nationallevel policies. in various quarters (private (4) Largely in response to the concern voluntary organizations andUNICEF, for example) overthis ignorance of social impacts andthe evolution of the welfareof the poor, there has been arise in attempts to tracethe linkages 49

between macropolicies and welfareimpacts (see Cornea et al., 1967). Linked to theconcern for social welfare is the often neglected need to predict the likelyproductive responses of various populationgroups.

Implicit in estimating differentialimpacts on various producersand consumers is knowing how macropolicies affectvarious levels of theeconomy and how these levels, in turn, function and interact in varioussocio-political contexts. The application of similarpolicy reform packages to therather different countries of Africa, Latin America,the Near East, and Asia is neitherefficient nor even rational. Yet this has been the fundamentalapproach of the first generation of adjustmentprograms (1980s).

THE WORLD BANK SDAPROJECT

In order to deal with the needto design appropriate policy recommenda- tions for governments desiring to relaunch or accelerate economicgrowth, while maintaining or enhancing social welfareand maximizing private-sectorproductive response, the World Bank in 1987 createda special "Social Dimensions of Adjustment" (SDA) project unit withinits Africa programs department.Research results in various African countriesshould yield valuable insightsnot only into a variety of specifically African cases, but into the fundamental linkagesbetween various levels of national economiesand the overall social andpolitical structures in which they are embedded(see World Bank, 1990a and 1990b).

SDA research activitiesare designed to explore and documenttwo types of linkages: (1) linkages between macroeconomic structuresparticularlythose affected by external shocks and bystabilization and adjustmentmeasures--and the intermediary structures of markets,other resource-allocation mechanisms,and economic and social infrastructure;and (2) linkages between theintermediary structures of what the SDA unit termsthe "mesoeconomy" and themicroeconomic world of enterprises and households.

Household economic analysisis doubly important.In developing countries the household is, expectably,the primary unit of bothconsumption and production, particularly in ruralareas. However, the rapid growth ofthe "informal" private sector in theburgeoning urban areas of developingcountries has greatly accentuated theenterprise functions of households. 50 promote overall The SDA policy agendafocuses on five objectives to country economicgrowth: Investing in householdhuman capital

Increasing household productiveassets

Raising household return onassets

Promoting wage employment Empowering the poor byexpanding their participationin community-level governmentdecision-making perspective to The Social Dimensionsproject, in embracing a "micro-up" faces the need to understandthe human complexities of economk development, theory. Not only can thebasic the household "black box"of neoclassical economic of economic activities beexamined at their source, but behavioral determinants various types of family the key concepts of socialwelfare can be measured for members: children, women,and men. The use of social andmicro-economic indicators derivedfrom data generated in annual orperiodic household surveys willbe necessary to produce the information required tobuild an understanding ofmicro-level economic SDA project has designed characteristics, response,constraints, and progress. The Intensive Household Survey(IHS) and a shorter, more two such surveys: an latter will be used to extensive Priority InformationCollection Survey (PIC). The monitor change and providequick feedback to policymakers, the former to merit a good deal search for explanations andfunctional linkages. These surveys of critical scrutiny bydevelopment practitioners,particularly anthropologists. level, however, Understanding socio-economicdynamics at the household indicators to will require more than theestablishment of socio-economic survey measure change overtime. Only by understandinghow households make allocative choices between scarce resourcesas producingand consuming groups, in additien to serving orproviding a variety of welfareneeds, such as nutrition, fine-tune sub-sectoral, or health maintenance, andeducation, can policy makers general welfare. "meso", policies to enhanceproductive response and ameliorate This should become a naturalniche for developmentanthropologists, but they focus conceptually will have to struggle for attentionfrom developmentalists who well above the level of humaneconomic behavior. 51 HOUSEHOLD DYNAMICS

Recent research on household dynamics anddecision-making has begun to reveal the complexnature of intra-household social those between relationships, particularly men and women. Far from unitedin response to external opportunities and constraints, thehousehold has been characterizedas "an uneasy aggregate of individual survivalstrategies (Schmink, 1984)." are some fairly constant themes Nonetheless, there in household organization,some of which have remained obscure untilrecently. A striking example ofthis is women's household economic and maintenanceroles, the latter usually obscuring statistics. the former in official

Women's household functions,research has shown,are dualistic; that is, women have clear-cut economic rolesin most societies, while, they are almost totally at the same time, responsible for householdprovisioning and maintenance activities. Purchasing food, securing or collecting fuel,and water supplyare women's responsibility. Thesedualistic roles systematicallylead to difficulties of counting women's overallproductive contributionsto national economies (see Dixon-Mueller and R. Anker,1988).

Women must also assure the crucial nurturing andsocialization of the next generation. This socialreproductive function involvescaring for the nutritional level and healthneeds of children andoverseeing their use of educational opportunities.Women, therefore,are cl' iely linked to societal public or private social use of services, which largelydetermines tFpresent and future quality of household humancapital (see Boyle, 1988).

MONITORING THE HOUSEHOLDEFFECTS OF POLICY REFORM

The household-leveleffectsof policy reform shouldbe carefully monitored through periodic surveys. These surveys should be designedio collect specific data on particularpopulations of interest, suchas urban or rural poor men and women. These groups of policy interest should becarefully identified and defined, whichshould be possible inmost countries from existing data sources, such as householdconsumpfion surveys,or simply from physical location. Accordingto the SDA project, approximately5 to 7 relatively large groups, each representing about 10percent of the population, should It is important to invest be studied. substantial time in theidentification of key to the listing and sampling groups, prior procedureF. In orderto do so, survey dosignersmust have considerableknowledge of the socioeconomic tics of the national population. composition and characteris- 52 of the type advocated The complevty of a perryinent household survey policy-linked instruments, by the SDA project isnot requiredof more focused, admnistered on abefore-after basis only.Moreover, once a which may be of interest can bere-surveyed in national survey has beenconductod, sub-groups qu?stionnaires. an "ad hoc" manner,using simpkr survey of informationneed to be gathered on Fundamentally, two types magnitude of households in appraisingpolicy impacts:characteristics and production response; andstate of socio-economicwelfare. productive capacity and production linkage between economicpolicies and household In the first case, the supply response are tobe analyzed activities must bemade, if causes of aggregate fine-tuning. This requireslearning directly for the purpose ofpolicy correction or human response topolicy reforms andshould allow policy from the short-term of different groups. advisors to calculate moreaccurately the supply response analyzing householdwelfare effects lies wellbeyond The importance of such as the very poor or women avoiding unintendedharm to population groups, is necessary tounderstand the differential and children. Onthe contrary, it and access to impacts of variouspolicy changes onfamily incomes, nutrition, services, in order topromote policieswhich tend to health and education by social policiestailored safeguard such benefits, orwhich can be accompanied This will require fairlydetailed analysis ofintra-household to such an end. control over income, decision-making patterns,income-generating activities, expenditures and savings,and access to and useof social services.

A.I.D. PROFESSION \ LS NON-PROJECT ASSISTANCE:CONCERNS AMONG sector assistance in The rapidly growingimportance of policy-based portfolios has begun togenerate questionsby field officers A.LD. field mission design needs and analysisrequired for adequate program about the information to the sizeable This is particularlyevident in field reaction and monitoring. Africa (DEA) (up to 30 non-project portion of the newDevelopment Fund for percent, based on countryperforma: by Vondal in this While sector-basedassistance is not new (see paper in economic supportfunds issue), the significantshift to policy conditionality in the DFA, (see Hessthis issue) (ESF) and in ordinarydevelopment assistance, as within which field officersmust appruach theproblem has created a new arena AID. development. Concernsexpressed recently among of promoting country design assistance to a scoreof field officers chargedwith providing program the 1990s not onlyeloqnently evoke numerousimportant African countries during worldwide. issues, but are probablytypical of field mission concerns 53

Concerns and recommendationsrelated to the significantshiftto non-project assistance in the DevelopmentFund for Africa, as revealedin cable exchanges and memoranda, havecentered on the following:

Policy-based sector assistanceshould be carefully distinguished from resource-transfersector assistance.

"Clear and rigorous analysis"should be made of the benefitsand costs of policy reform, while foreignexchange and localcurrency generated by theprogram should be channeled to alleviating those costs.

Missions should undertake"detailed and quantitative"sector assessments prior to initiating policy-basedassistance efforts.

Conditionaliiy should be removedfrom grant agreements, made more supple, and disbursements linkedto alleviating the costs of .orm, rather than to policychange

Missions should use "market-clearing"mechanisms for disburse- ments whenever possible.

The relationship betweensectoral reform and themacroeconomic policy context must begrasped by field missions, inorder to improve the design ofsector based efforts and to makean effective case to hostgovernments.

Policy-based assistance is butone part of a larger reform process and such assistance shouldcome only toward the end of the process, rather than as an inducementto begin.

THE CALI, FOR INFORMATION

The overriding need expressedby concerned A.I.D officers isto quantity the benefits of policy reform,while at the same timeidentifying and even quantifying the financial, political,and social costs of reform. Thisimplies a "formidable requirement" forinformation about thesector and its functional relationship to the rest of theeconomy. Unfommately, missionsare engaged in program design without an adequateinformation base, so that at the of document preparation beginning (Program Assistance Initial Proposal),proposed designs are often still based on littlemore than "supposition tind folklore." 54 AID. officers are: Priority informationneeds often indicated by The patterns of productionand consumption ofvarious popula- tion groups.

The existence of gender-linkeddifferences in income sources or in spending responsibilities. The nature of the domesticproduction technologies andtheir relationship to other alternativetechnologies, both within the assisted country or adoptablefrom abroad. involved in The efficiency andeffectiveness of the institutions implementing sectoral reforms.

THE SECTOR ASSESSMENT has beer, the lack A major problem indesigning policy-based assistance of such an assessmentshould be of an adequate sectorassessment. The objective and qualitative backgrounddata and analysis in order to to provide quantitative and opportunities in a understand the nature ofdeve'apment constraints thorough understanding particular sector. The sectorasseFsment should lead to a participants, market relationshipsamong them,capabilities of the identity of the sector, and the natureand and objectives of theinstitutions dealing with the impact of public policy. The users of thisinformation will be, on the onehand, AID. field alternative policy reforms, officers, who will be able toquantify the benefits of (winners) and losers, andperhaps suggest methods to identify beneficiaries governmental officials engaged compensate the losers.On the other hand, host risks of reform can consult in policy dialogue andconcerned with the political fresh data and analysisprior to accepting a reform program. following sections, The -tor assessment shouldconsist ideally of the developed wL advance of initiating programassistance. reconnais- (1) The first of these assessmenttools is the preliminary sance. This wouldbe conducted by a "high-levelteam" charged with surveying alreadyexisting data sources,defining issues, -nd designing scopes of workfor further data collectionand sp. .1- ized studies. 55 (2) A household income andexpenditure survey isa necessity to provide the government and A.I.D.field mission informationon financial flows between householdsand between households and firms. Often information aboutintra-family financialarrange- ments are importantas well.If such dataare not already available, a survey will haveto be conducted as part of thesector assessment process. However, sucha survey should focus on essential information. Both thecomplexity of the survey instru- ment and the sample size-1st be limited to avoid becomingan administrative burden.

(3) A mathematical model of thesector and its relationship to the national economy is deemedessential by many within AID.,if the quantitative implications ofalternative reform packagesare to be grasped by the host government andthe A.I.D. mission. However, such a model should beno mcre complicated than necessary to produce useful and reasonablyaccurate results for policy makers. While not sacrificingintellectual rigor, complexity must not exceed what is intuitively -ufficientfor policy makers. (4) Beyond the model, the followingtypes of specialized and subsectoral studies are usuallyproposed: institutions and organizations financial markets labor markets international trade regulations political analysis andassessment

(5) Finally, a synthesis of specializedstudies and recommendations is useful for presentationto the A.I.D. field mission andto the host government. The mathematicalmodel and householdsurvey data should be used to reviewvarious policy options withthe government, including an explicitidentification and quantifica- tion of winners and losers fromvarious programmatic alterna- tives.

The result of this long process of assessment (up to one year) fromreconnaissance to synthesis and recommendations should be a joint A.I.D.-hostgovernment plan of action involving bothpolicy reform initiatives andtraditional-style projects. Only by gathering sufficientinformation in advancecan sector adjustment strategies be properly tailoredto local country conditions. 56

THE CHALLENGE TODEVELOPMENT ANTHROPOLOGY in Africa under the Sectoral, community, andhousehold analyses planned for A.I.D. in non-projectassistance, beg the participation SDA project or proposed analysis of the typefamiliar to of anthropologists.However, micro-level anthropologists is likely to remainunpopular within the fieldof international The reasons for development, particularly amongeconomists and administrators. economists and anthropologists this have far more to dowith differences in how devising and implementing view the world than with costand time constraints in household-level surveys. solutions reveals the The current emphasis onbroad economic policy deep frustration of manydevelopment practitioners,primarily macroeconomists intractable problems of ThirdWorld and administrators,faced with the seemingly certainly truth to the argumentthat structural development. While there is developmentalists must not adjustment is necessary torenewed economic growth, Few seriously oppose be led down the gardenpath of oversimplistic panaceas. assuming it is environmentallysustainable. However, reneweC economic growth, reduction is another the link between economicgrowth and broad-based poverty problem altogether. themselves among the Development anthropologistshave won a place for of the litany that knowing "harder" technical specialiststhrough tireless repetition projects matters. However,the "soft" social scientistis who the people are in him or her to show why continually on the defensive;the burden of proof is on in project success orfailure. The assumption byother and how people matter that a technical specialists is that humanbeings are very much a constant, solution will be seized uponby populations in muchthe same way anywhere. seed varieties, irrigation systems, Such technical solutions arenot limited to new equipment, but includeeconomic policies,particularly price policies. or capital economic policy makers, The assumption of universalhuman rationality guides development projects. much as it drives theintroduction of technology in What is anious in all thisis that examples aboundin the development attention to the fit between literature of project tailu reresulting from inadequate the sociocultural contextof the recipient population.A technical solutions and roles of women consistent e-ro,'.o take one example,is ignoring the economic that political realities mightbe ignored; (see Blumbc- ";9). One can understand of the unfortunat uch myopia extends tothe socioeconomic iealities populations concorned. development In spite of substantial andincreasing evidence th.it many social dimension of human projects have failed frominadequate appraisal of the

t 71 57

economic response, the quality of pre-project socialsoundness analysis seems seriously on the decline even in M.D., where itprobably developed further than in other major bilateral agencies. Evenat its apogee in the late 1970s in A.LD., social appraisal of projects rarely managedto focus on the key linkages between existing human behavior and proposed technicalsolutions. The analyses, thus, often appeared irrelevant to the technical specialistsdesigning the core of the project intervention. The future effectiveuse of social analysis in U.S.A.1.D. is uncertain (see Gow et a), 1989).

Although some of the blame for the failure ofsocial analysis must be laid on those practicing the art, much of the prejudice against it existsbecause it does not fit into the technicist models of those dominatingdevelopment work. Today, more than ever, development is seen by the major donoragencies as primarily a function of economic growth,a belief partly born of the perceived failure of myriad small-scale development projects sincethe 1960s. In consequence, social analysis, if it is to survive inprogram appraisal, will need to insert itselfmore effectively into the logic of economics.

The requirement that social analysis fit intothe development models of other fields, particularly economics, isunevivocally a reality anda necessity. Professional anthropologists will need topet fect arguments and supply case examples in support of weaknesses of otherparadigms, rather than simply vaunting the merits of their own intellectual histoiy.

PARADIGM AND MEASUREMENT PROBLEMS

The major problem for social analysis andits practitioners is that inserting socioeconomicissues--by their natureinherentlymicroeconornicinto macroeconomic analysis is conceptuallyvery difficult.Macroeconomics, the driving force behind structural adjustment,even when focused on sectoral problems, remains analytically well above the levelof human behavior.

Macroeconomics is, in fact, not concerned with thesituational determi- nants of human economic behavior, but rather with themechanistic, interrelation- ships between national-level variables.It therefore becomes difficult-ifnot irrelevantfor economists to reduce their theoriesto the level of differential human behavior, much as it is for sociologiststo include psychological determi- nants in their analyses.While itis not conceptually impossibleto do so, explaining national-level economicoutcomes in terms of collective behavioral response requires joining levels of analysis whose linkagesremain virtually unexplored. 58

Moreover, the macro and microeconomiclevel each has its own battery of measurements. On the onehand, there are the national accountsand other regularly collected national data onemployment, health, and edution. In some countries, data may also be collectedperiodically on household expenditures and consumption, employment andunemployment, and on other variables ofinterest.

Most economic anthropological research, onthe other hand, focuses on individuals in social structures, in order toconstruct the form and dynamicsof the typical "community", itself a proxyfor the universe of such groups.In economic anthropology the unit ofinterest is often the householdproduction- consumption unit, and imestigationusually includes intra-household dynamics.

Generalization of microeconomic researchfindings beyond the regional economy is, unfortunately,difficult. Thus, the applicability of anthropological research to the interpretation ofnational-level statistics is often challenged because of its particularity. While thehuman dimension of economic growth can certainly be explored through this means,such findings are considered largely irrelevant by national-level planners.

The battle lines are thus drawnbetween developmentalists interested in engineering economic growth throughnational policy measures and those who maintain that human motivations,incentives, and constraints must be understood if policy reform is to attain itsgrowth objectives. Beyond this are the veryreal concerns of the equitabledistribution of growth and its environmentalsustain- ability. All imply attention tounderstanding how human beings relate to governmental institutions and policies andhow traditional economic systems can be targeted for broad-based production response.

CONCLUSION Ultimately, the challenge to anthropologistsfrom the World Bank Social Dime:isions of Adjustment project andsimilar efforts is clear: we had better do more than stand byidly while rnacroeconomists and statisticiansreinvent social institutions. There are, however, no easyprescriptions; development is more often understood io be economic growth than anincrease in human welfare, although the former is presumed to leadsomehow to the latter.

By penetrating the dominantmodels of economic development in order to exploit weaknesses onlymicro-level socioeconomic and sociopoliticalanalysis can resolve,anthropologists and other social scientists canmake a difference. The experience of the SDA project in theWorld Bank, involving household and .7;1 59

community surveys and mesoeconomicanalysis, should be carefully studiedand, where possible, influenced.Questionnaire design should certainlyreflect traditional anthropological insights intothe social organization of productionand consumption activities.

The SDA project isvery much a maverick in the general trendtoward macro-level policy solutionsto economic growth cum development.The World Bank is, in fact, buildinga considerable data machine to addressincreasing concern over the lack of human progress inmost areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. In the years aheadat least in Africathereshould be no dearth of householddata to ponder. It remains to be seen howdevelopment anthropologists,rare within the Bank, can exploit tl.is opportunityto respond to the needs ofa wide variety of donor agencies.

The growing need within A.1.D.to account for the population effectsof non-project assistance, particularly inAfrica, points to the necessity forwide- spread and frequent dissemination oflessons learned by the WorldBank and A.I.D. field missions as they grapplewith the need formore information. Tracing the linkages between national policiesand human behavioralresponse tbrough the mesoeconomic world oforganizations, institutions, legal codes,community structures, and sociocultural conventionis very much an anthropological endeavor. It remains to beseen how well it can be done and the degreeto which its findings an be assimilated byeconomists and development planners. 60

REFERENCES

Boyle, Philip Effects of Structural Adjustment on 1988 The Socio-economic Women. Paper presented tothe OFCD/DAC. Paris, France. October 5, 1988.

Blumberg, Rae Gender Variable: Women and 1989 Making the Case for the the Wealth and Well-beingof Nations. TechnicalReports in Gender and DevelopmentNo. 1/1989.PPC/WID, Agency for InternationalDevelopment.Washington, D.C. October, 1989.

Dixon-Mueller, Ruth and R.Anker Contributions to Develop- 1988 Assessing Women's Economic ment. Geneva:International Labour office.

Schmink, Marianne Review and Research 1984 Household Economic Strategies: Agenda. Latin AmericaResearch Review. 19:3:87-101.

Vondal, Patricia Analysis for PolicyReform 1990 Social and Institutional Programs in Africa. Paperpresented to the American Anthropological Association.Washington, D.C. Novem- ber 17, 1989.

World Bank Poverty: A Conceptual, 1990a Structural Adjustment and Empirical and PolicyFramework. February, 1990.No. 8393-APR.

World Bank FY91 Work Ilan. Assessment 1990b FY90 Activity Report and of the Social Dimensionsof Structural Adjustmentin Sub-Saharan Africa. June 1, 1990. SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS IN THE AFRICAN ECONOMIC POLICY REFORM PROGRAM

PATRICIA J. VONDAL

INTRODUCTION Programs for promoting and supporting macroeconomic and sectoral policy reform have become a prominent element in the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID.) strategy for fostering sustained, broadbased economic growth in developing countries worldwide. These reform programs have major social, instilutional, and pplitical implications. Yet, to date, the frequency and quality of analysis of these issues in the design stageof such programs has been very low. This paper highlights someof the major analytical gaps which need attention and assessmentby the anthropological and social science community, as the trend toward U.S. foreign assistancefor economic policy reform continues.

The promotion of policy reform, either by pvernments themselves, or by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, is now an international reality, much as is international trade. Policy reform programs, and international trade networks both affect the local populations that have always been the concern of the anthropological community. The effects of deliberate macrolevel policy shifts can dramatically yet differentially affect scores of people on a level far broader than is typicallyfound under standard development projects with which development anthropologists are more familiar. Accordingly, anthropologists must acknowledge theseprograms and their implications.

61 62 Anthropologists and social scientists in related fields must begin contributing to the design of policy reforms to help ensure that the most negative effects on people are lessened, and that attempts to stimulate national economic growth through reform encourage growth with equity. This paper is based on a review of social and institutional analysis contained in design documents for A.I.D.'s African Economic Policy Reform Programs from 1985 through 1988. These findings are followed by a discussion of some of the recommended areas of social, institutional, and political analysis that were devised by social scientists within A.I.D. as guidelines for the kinds of issues which must be addressed prior to working with governments to institute major economic reforms. Although the focus is on A.I.D.-supported programs in Sub-Saharan Africa, similar kinds of economic reforms have also been promotei in Latin America and Asia since the early 1980's.

THE GENESIS OE THE AFRICAN ECONOMIC POLICY REFORM PROGRAM

The African Economic Policy Reform Program, announced by former President Reagan in 1984, is one of the centerpieces of A.I.D.'s assistance effort to help African governments restructure their economies. The goal is to achieve broad-based and sustainable economic growth through policy reforms featuring such measures as privatization of government supported services, increasing the role of the private sector in the economy, and liberalization of the economy. Cash grants are provided to governments for balance of payments support, but the release of these funds is dependent on the fulfillment of certain conditions. These entail implementation of a series of economic policy reform measures, typically in the financial and agricultural sectors.

The rationale for policy-based assistance to Africa is the assumption that one of the primary underlying causes of the severe economic problems experienced in Sub-Saharan Africa has been the inefficient policies followed in many African states. Development projects are typically unable to address the larger structural issues which underlie economic problems, and thus their objectives arts not easily attained. The countries in which these policy reform programs have been actively promoted are those in which a commitment to reform has already been demonstrated, and these A.I.D.-funded programs are most often in support of structural adjustment programs sponsored by the World Bank, IMF, and the nation itself. 6 3

There has beena growiog concern regarding theimpact of economic stabilization and policy reform programs sponsored by the WorldBank, IMF, A.1.D., and other banks and donors which have inmany instances resulted in the deterioration of health andeconomic conditions insome of the poorest groups in countries undergoing reforms,and in particular,poor women and children.' Other aspects of theseprograms have created severepressures on governments as people in urban capitals protest or riot against the cessationof salary raises hiring in public sector jobs, or the reductionor elimination of subsidieson basic goods, or the reform of fiscalpolicies. These impacts have movement of reform implementations jeopardized the and have resulted ingovernments moving away from agreements signed with banksand donors.

This concern about thesocial and political effectsof such programs is evinced in efforts to implementmeasures to lessen the adverse "short impact of reforms term" on people until the positive effects ofoverall economic growth on all population groups can be achieved. The latter isa major assumption of all policy reform programs.2More important for A.I.D.is the Congressional legislation concerning assistance to Africa. It includes language thatdirects A.I.D. to broaden the policy dialogueto include discussions of policies human welfare, to that safeguard use assistance to meet more directlythe needs of thepoor majority in Africa, to makedevelopment assistance availableto African women, and to insure that suchsupport results in aprocess of long-term development that is equitable, participatory,and environmentallsustainable.

In light of theseconcerns, it is important to anticipateimpacts on human beings, to understand thesocial and politicalcontext of policy reform in each country, and to fully analyze thecapabilities and politics of the will be implementing institutions that measures under these reforms. To thedegree that impacts can be anticipated, specific measures should be taken to preventnegative effects.

REVIEW OF THE DESIGN OF A.I.D.'S AFRICAN ECONOMICP01 ICY REFORM PROGRAMS

In 1987 I was asked by thesocial science advisor of A.l.D.'s to assess the frequency, quality, Africa Bureau and utility of social andinstitutional analysis in A.I.D's policy reform assistance to Sub-SaharanAfrican as revealed inthe planning and design documentsfor the 14 country reformprograms which existed at that time (Vondal, 1988).3 There was a concern that onlymacroeconom- ic analytical work supportedthe design of theseprograms and that significant social issues were not being fully addressed. Another rationalefor this assessment was the belief of Agency socialscientists that attentionto social and institutional factors is often a major key to the success of developmentassistance. At issuewas 64 reform programs forSub-Saharan the extent to which theA.I.D.- supported policy and institutional issues. Africa had incorporated ananalysis of related social review were: how Accordingly, major questionsunderlying the program design stage prevent negativeeffects can social andinstitutional analysis at the enhance the probabilitythat some of from occurring? and,how can such analysis of the African EconomicPolicy Reform Programwill be the major stated goals economic growth, some achieved? In addition to theachievement of broad-based overall program are:1) to lessen the politicaldifficulties of of the goals of the 2) to raise the implementing major economicreforms and debt repayment; equitable access to the meansof incomes of the poor; and3) to ensure more achieving growth (U.S.A.I.D.,1987). Economic Policy Before reviewing the programdesigns for the African by reading recent A.I.D.dooiments on the preliminary Reform Program, I began implemented in several assessments of resultsof economic reform programs other documents reporting Sub-Saharan Africa countriesalong with a number of program experiences.These helped on World Bankand IMF structural adjustment of the key social,institutional, and politicalissues.' While none to identify some policy reform programsthat I of these studies focused onthe specific economic Africa Bureau, theirimportance and use in thisstudy was reviewed for analysis in their utility for beginningto frame criteriafor social and institutional in economic policyreform assistance. identifying and examining I constructed categoriesof issues as a basis for political, and institutionalanalysis in the designdocuments the quality of social, African countries. These for economic policy reform programsin 14 Sub-Saharan 1) issues related to anoverall understanding ofthe categories included: 2) disaggregation populations most likely tobe effected by the reform program; elements of the reform program on of social and economicimpacts from specific population subsectors such asthe poor, women, andchildren; 3) political issues support for thereform program fromkey social, such as the likelihood oi institutional issues such as political, and economic groupswithin the country; 4) economic reforms; 5) lessonsfrom the ability of the governmentto implement the implemented elsewhere; and 6)social, institution- similar policy reform programs evaluation al, and political datacollection requirementsfor monitoring and throughout the life of the program. the review of social and A rating system wasthen constructed for policy r4orm programs.I institutional analysis containedin the design of these the quality aid usefulnessof analysis under each designed the ratings to assess reviewed lacked a section or issue identified. Because sowof the documents

PP I 65

annex of social and/or institutional analysis findings, I reviewed entire documents in terms of these criteria and ratedthe social,. institutional and political analysis within that document. I identifieda good design as one that provided a full analysis of a particular issue andits implications for the program, and recommendations for addressing the issueto increase the effectiveness of the program.

I assigned numerical ratings toprograms for each category of issue; 0= no mention of issue; 2 = intermediate level of analysis of issue andits implica- tions for the program; and 3= full analysis of the issue and some identified means of addressing it(i.e., providing alternatives or recommendationsto mitigate potential negative impacts from the policyreforms on specific population groups). '

Using the framework and rating system described above,the subsequent assessment clearly demonstrated a deficiency in the frequencyand quality of social and institutional analysis contained in the designdocuments of the African Economic Policy Reform Programs. The majorassumptions underpinning all these programs are based on macroeconomic theory, particularly thatset of assump- tions that underlies the theory of "the magic of themarketplace." Very rarely were these assumptions about macroeconomic phenomenarelated to the specifics of local level or even regional level social andeconomic conditions of the countries in question. The following sections highlightissues which require immediate attention and assessment based on themore striking analytical gaps uncovered by this study.

ANALYTICAL NEEDS FOR LIBERALIZATION REFORMS

There is a need for analysis and assessment of theimpact of programs featuring liberalization reforms in whichgovernment regulation of certain aspects of the economy is reduced or eliminated. Such reformsare assumed to result in beneficial econornic growth. For example, in the AfricanEconomic Policy Reform Programs, liberalization reformsare often designed for the agricultural sector. Formerly government-determinedfarm-gatepricesforbasicagricultural commodities are opened up to market demand withthe assumption that prices will increase, 'and thereby create incentives forrural farmers to producemore goods. Such programs assun,hat the benefits of these reforms will favorthe entire rural, agriculturally-ba.ed sector, and redressthe existing bias toward urban consumers. But frequently ignoredare the many circumstances in which rural producers are also purchasers andconsumers of basic grains.It is clear that higher prices hurt the urbanpoor and middle class. Wvhat we also need to ask is the effect of higher priceson the purchasing and consumption ability of

S t 66 farmers. Policy designers need tounderstand the social and economiccharacteris- tics of specific agricultural societiesbefore designing reforms meant tostimulate greater domestic productionand greater economic well-beingof the rural populace. Other reforms have required governmentsin Sub-Saharan Africa to institute fully market-determinedforeign exchange rates and to remove taxes on agricultural exports to eliminate theirdampening effects on domestic agricultural production for export. A growingnumber of studies have demonstratedthat excharee-rate and price reforms aresignificant, but not sufficient meansfor increasing agricultural exports andfarmer incomes (Diakosavvas andKirkpatrick, 1990). Evidence shows that farmerresponsiveness to improved prices isbased on factors such as adequate ruraltransportation infrastructure, reliabledelivery systems for required agriculturalinputs, and credit services. Yet theIMF and the World Bank, through their structuraladjustment loans, have required these same governments to reduce governmentdevelopment expenditures to lower overall budget deficits. Many of these cutshave halted investments in theagricultural sector, particularly ruralinfrastructure and services to farmers(Mosley and Smith 1989). In many African countries,such as Zambia, rural transportationand other services remain poorly developedand farmers are unable to respond toprice increases (or agricultural products(sec Warren, 1986 and Weber et al.,1988). Hence, analysis for macroeconomicreforms designed to increase domestic production of agricultural exports forthe benefit of the national economy and, farmer income, must be extended toinclude a full analysis of farmer constraints to production in ruralregions.

ANALYTICAL NEEDS FOR PRIVATIZATIONREFORMS

There is a need for analysis and assessmentof privatization reforms in which the private sector is expected totake over important economic activities and services. The private sectorhas become a huge black box inneed of examination. Major questions arisesuch as:

1. What individuals or organizationsLxist in the economy to take over economic, social, and health servicesformerly provided by government agencie:i and parastatals? Can banksand donor agencies promoting privatization reforms assume that a "privatesector" will spring up over night to take over critical educationaland health services, and to participate as full actors in the economy?This is particularly important in those countries where governmentdistrust of the private sector actors has dominated th? economic climatefor years. Will the private sector 67

actors be willing to immediately enter thearena of the formal economy, or will distrust of government intentions and fear of backlashcreate a barrier to participation? Given theseconsiderations, what kinds of impacts will privatization haveon the former recipients of govern- ment-provided services?

2. Where private sector serviees do exist,what is their capability for providing these services- can we automatically assume higher quality and more economical and efficient servicedelivery than that provided by the government?

3. Is there a guarantee that service provisionby private local organizations and actors will insure equitableaccess to credit, services, and other goods? We must also examine whetherprivate sector monopolies will spring up to take the place of publicsector monopolies. Who will be able to participate in a new, "open"economy

An assessment of Senegal's NewAgricultural Policy providesan illustration of the need to examine thesequestions. Under this policy, privatiza- tion of credit for seeds and fertilizerwas instituted as part of the overall reform program to increase rural production and rural incomes(see Ross et al., 1987). Village agricultural cooperatives gainedan expanded role in agricultural credit delivery as these serviceswere withdrawn from Senegal's agricultural parastatal agencies. The assumptionwas that the village cooperatives would providea more efficient and effective means of servicedelivery to farmers as comparedto that delivered by the agricultural parastatals. However,a study of the impacts of these agricultural sector reforms found that thecooperatives we're dominated by village administration council members, and althoughwomen play a large role in Senegalese agricultural production, thecooperatives had no female members. Men with high socioeconomic and politicalstatus within the community received disproportionate shares of peanut seed cTeditin both the 1985-86 and 1986-87 planting years. The samepersons received seed credit both years although there was an 82% increase in the volume of credit.

One of the conclusions of the study isthat women receive littlesupport for agricultural production from theNew Agricultural Policy, justas they were not served by the previous parastataldistribution of inputs. Thus, the levelof women's agricultural production haschanged very litJe and their incomehas probably been negatively affected relativeto men's. These findings providea cogent example of the necessity for carefulassessment of private sector alternatives, particularly with regardto achieving the objectives of raisingrural incomes and growth with equity. Impactassessments of privatization relormson 68 population groups need to disaggregatedata to examine the differentialimpact c i men and women.

POLICY THE INSTITUTIONAL ANDPOLITICAL CONTEXT OF ECONOMIC REFORM A third area of inquiryentails the analysis and assessmentof both governmental capability and politicalwillingness to implement major policy reform programs. There is a need toexamine the in-country capabilityfor policy analysis, design, and implementation, aswell as management, administration,and evaluation of policy reform programs.Many studies have shown that government and public support forimplementing macroeconomic reformsis greatly reduced when the rationale for andimplications of undertaking thesereforms are not well understood (Grind le and Thomas,1988). Yet donors often expect governmentsto implement complex programswithout assessing present capabilityand have not worked in concert with governments toactually devise realistic reform programs which they could crediblyadminister. U limately at issue is thecapability and willingness of African institutions,specifically their government ministries, research institutes, and universities,to analyze economic andsocial problems arising from existinggovernment-level policies, and to reviseand implement their own policy reform programswithout relying on internationaldonors and lenders. Government fear of political unrestand social reaction constitutesthe primary reason for delays in theimplementation of policy reform initiatives(ibid, and see HIM. 1990). Forexample, if a reform will result inobvious changes which could affect a broad spectrumof the public, key activist groupswithin the country are likely to behighly vocal about potential negativeeffects, and accordingly, the government is lesswilling to implement reform agendasin their entirety. Conversely, reformswhich entail less dramatic effects or.the public may threaten the position of indiN, 'Is located in the politicalbureamracy. This likelihood will also undermir alingness to implement new proceduresand policies required by the refor, I program.Despite the significant effect o' the political environment on theimplementation of policy reforms, thedesign of the majority of the African EconomicPolicy Reform programs reviewedevinced marginal understanding of thepolitical and instititutional contexts inwhich these programs will have tobe implemented, and did notseriously examine the political risks to current cegimes. Itis clear that an analysis ofpolitical and institutional issues is imperative tothe design and conduct of futuremajor economic reform programs. 69 ON PEOPLE THE DIFFERENTIAL IMPACTSOF ECONOMIC REFORM

There is a need to arta': ,.e potentialimpacts of all elements of economic population by location policy reform programs onall relevant segments of the and by gender and (rural vs. urban), socio-econmnicstatus, employment sector, tendencies age group. Inreviewing program designdocuments I noticed several which did not take into accountthese important socioeconomicconsiderations.

Use of aggregate populationdata for projecting impacts.

A focus on the hoped forlong-term impacts on populations at the expense of examininglikely short-term impacts.

A focus on positive ratherthan negative impacts.

GUIDELINES FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OFSOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL POLICY A.I.D. SECTORAL DEVELOPMENTASSISTANCE AND ECONOMIC REFORM PROGRAMS

One contributing factorunderlying the limited analysisof these issues discussed above, has been thelack of specific guidance foranalyzing social, institutional, and political issues inthe dcsign of policy reform programs.The of existing review included an examinationof the usefulness and applicability economic policy project social soundness analysisguidelines to A.I.D.-sponsored reform programs. These projectguidelines lack coverage of severalimwi.ant features which are germane topolicy reform programs. Theylack guidance for and institutional issues related toprivatization and the analysis of social, political, The liberalization reforms which arecentral to many policy reform programs. existing social soundnessanalysis guidelines do notinclude directions for conducting institutional analysisof large public sector entities,such as ministries, normally charged with program or parastatals.Yet it is these entities that are implementation, monitoring, analysis,and evaluation or they are targetsof policy reform themselves. Also lackingis guidance on the levelof specificity needed for good design the assessment of social,political, and institutional issues to ensure in support of the objectivesof economic policy reform programs. phase of This lacuna in non-economicanalytical criteria for the design within the economic policy reform programscontributed to an increasing call institutional analysis social science community at A.I.D.for establishing saLial and guidelines. In 1988 a set ofproposed guidennes was draftedwhich focused primarily on required analysis foreconomic policy reform programs(U.S.A.l.D., 1988a, 1988b). Some of thefeatures of these guideline; arereiterated in an 70

important new proposal for socialanalysis requirements for thirdworld development in the 1990's containedin a report by Gow et al. (1989).Both sets of guidelines have relevance to economic policy reformprograms world-wide- and not just to Sub-Saharan Africa,and for donor institutionsother than A.I.D. While the full details of theseproposals cannot be given in thespace of this paper, the following will provide an idea of thedirection this required analysis would take as indicated by thedraft A. I.D. guidelines.

Understanding the Target Population.Much of policy reformassistance is designed to address features of theexisting policies that constrainthe effective and efficient functioning ofa country's economy. Designinga program that effectively addresses constraintsto productivity necessitatesan understanding of how these constraints currentlyaffect productive behaviorof the involved population group(s), and thecharacteristics, e.g. socio-economicstatus and gender, of the people who makeup these groups. Policy reformprograms may not specify or refer to a particular subsetof the population that willnecessarily be affected by the program, and may instead, for example, articulatemore general goals such as increasing theproductivity of the agricaturalexport sector as a means of increasing the nation's supply offoreign exchange. A typical policy reform program design would discuss the needto liberalize the prices of agriculturalgoods in order to stimulateincreased production. Although specificpopulation groups ordinarilyare not targeted, the economic behavior of key groups in the general population is supposedto change in response to the changes effectedby the proposedprogram. The analyst has the task then of identifyiltg which groups are engaged inthe production of agricultural exports. Thenext step is the identification of significantfeatures of the farming system and social organization of production whichare necessary to know in terms of the proposedreform program. These couldinclude such characteristics as land owrcrshippatterns; age and sex composition ofthe actual farming population; differentiation among producers by socio-economicstatus, production strategies, availableagricultural technology, producers'marketing strategies, and other sources of householdincome,

The objective of this analysisshould be to identify and analyzethe major constraints affecting productivityin the sector, in this examplethe agricultural sector, in addition to themore commonly targeted problem of lowform-gate prices received for goods. Theseconstraints may include laborconstraints, poor credit availability for seeds,fertilizer, or equipment,poor farm-to-market roads, and competing economicopportunities. The goals of thisanalysis are to identify and prioritize froma sociocultural perspective,necessary actions to promote productivity. Thismay include, but not be limitedto, liberalizing prices of 71

agricultural goods, improvingfarm-to-market roads; andmore precise targeting of the populationgroup, or subset within that is aimed. group, toward whom theprogram

Program Impacts. T. analyst should examine the credibilityof program design assumptions regarding thenature of policy reformimpacts on the target population. Who may beunintentionally affected bythe program reforms? analyst should attempt The to determine the probabledistribution of likely short-am', long-term direct and indirectimpacts. This discussion should by gender, socio-economic disaggregate impact status, location (urbanvs. rural), occupationgroups, etc., as appropriate to featuresof the program Theanalyst should anticipate negative impacts as well, and recommend means to mitigatethese. For example, economic stabilization programs which seek to reducegovernment expenditures have in some cases resultedin government's cuttingback on important social services such as health care provision. One recommendationmight be to maintain specially targeted healthservices for pregnantwomen, infants, and children among the rural and urbanpoor. Distributi, nal Issues with Specific References toEquity.The analyst should identify distributionalissues whichmay occur with new organizational arrangements for the provision of goods and services underprograms which promote the involvement andgrowth of privatesector economic activity. This question relates to achieving broad-based growth withequity. For example, the availability of commercialcredit may be expandedfor private sector actors under an existing economic government-owned bank,or with the creation ofa new private sector bank- what institutional mechanismsare in place to ensure equity of access to commercial credit? Shouldany subgroups of the population,i.e., women, small-scale traders, small-scaleenterprise owners, particular groups, be especially targeted ethnic to ensure equity of access?The analyst should recommend means for increasingequity of access to goodsand services under privatization progiams andunder programs thatpromote the growth o; the private sector to those targetedgroups of individuals.

institutional Analysis- The analysis of institutional issues should determinafion of the institutions include a joint which must be involvedin decision-making and implementation of the reformprogram, and the necet.aity for these entities when coordination among more than one institution will beinvolved. If coordinationis necessary, what is the mechanismor institution that could provide The analyst should this function? recommend how this coordinationshould work based knowledge of the organizational on a culture of the involvedinstitutions and political relations among theseentities. The organizational institutions that will be culture of each ofthe involved in programimplementation, monitoring,and 72 information such as linesof authority, evaluating should beassessed including decision-making systems,personne ncentive systems, communication systems, either How might the relevantfeatures of thet.e institutions and political factions. implementation success? Theanalyst should enhance or constrain program the institution based onthis recommend means forworking effectively with analysis.

climate and Political Analysis - Theanalyst should examinethe current political it which could eithersupport or constra;nprcrram factors that are affecting situations St as objectives and goals.These may includeinternal events or within the civil servicebureaucracy, st.ng program threat tostatus and power to public support from recentelections, or the lackof government authori% regulations in remote areas;and external events suc:, as enforce policies and markets for critical commcqi..ies regional warfare or thesudden loss of overseas The analyst shouidrecommend ways that the prop().,ed produced by the country. political 3upport for program cantake these events intoaccount to ensure should examine the potentialof civil unrest in respon ,'. to reforms. The analyst attention to such gron features of the proposedreform program including university students, theurban poor, and trade u: polif:^al party members, eliminate negative atit,cts To the extent possible,recommend means to reduce or of the pi )gram that mayresult in civil unrest.

and EvaluationThe analyst should assesssocial, political, Data for Monitoring monitoring and evaluation,and for and institutional dataneeds for program b,,nalyzed a Id incorporat- testing program assumptions.How should such data modifications? The analys; n't .ecommend ed into possible program shIrti1-.e employed for data in-country organizationsand/or individuals who collection and analysisunder the program.

ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND OTHER IMPLICATIONS OF THISSTUDY FOR CONCERNED SOCIALSCIENTISTS detailed above do notexhaustively cover all the The proposed guidelines policy issues which requiresocial and institutionalanalysis under economic should consult the growingliterature reform programs.Concerned individuals calls to attention someof the most on this topic.However, this brief synopsis which social scientistsshould focus Whilo rutalsociologists critical issues upon analysis of these issues, and political economists areposed to contribute to the should play a major rolebased on their traditftwal anthropologists in particular institutions, attention to andunderstandings of the dynamicsof organizations and 73

and to ways in which individuals in specificlocales and cultures work andtry to adapt to conditions of the largereconomy in which they live. As a precursor to such an analysis,itis essential to have an understandingof standard macroeconomic theory and how it actuallyimpinges on economic and political behavior.

Anthropologists interested in workingon development issues, particularly those trained in political, economic, andagricultural anthropology, need to learn more about the implications of economic policy reformprograms and to conduct policy analysis for both domesticas well as international reform programs. In this way anthropologists can make the necessary contributionsto more socially and politically responsible policies. Such analyticalcontributions to the field of development are critical as U.S. foreign assistanceto nations continues to be based on the willingness of governmentsto implement major economic reforms. It is equally imperative that the conductof analysis for the design of socially informed economic policies be doneincreasingly by social scientists nativeto those countries where such reforms will beimplemented.

NOTES

1. For reviews of the socialconsequences of macroeconomic policy reforms, see Boyle,The Sociolconomic Effects of StructuralAdjustment on Women (1988), Cornia et. al., Adjustmentwith a Human Face (1987), Heller et. al., The Implications of Fund-SupportedAdjustment Programs for Poverty (1988), Hood, McGuire, andStarr, The Socioeconomic Impact of Macroeconomic Adjustment (1988), PerPinstrupAnderson, Macroeco- nomic Adjustment and Human Nutrition(1988), World Bank; World Development Report 1990: Poverty (1990),and Zuckerman.. Adjustment Programs and Social Welfare (1988).

2. See for exnple, A.I.D. The Impact of WorldAssessment and Adjustment Prograron A.I.D. Target Groups; Implications for Fooct Aid.1986) and he '.';'01 Id Bank, Protecting thePoor Dunng Periods of Adjustment 4S7). 74 design documents that werereviewed 3. The 14 policy reform program under this assignment werefor the countries of Malawi,Zambia, Rwanda, Mauritius,Mali, , Senegal, Zaire,Togo, Gambia, Cameroon, Niger, and Uganda. assessment 4. The reports that 1 used forbackground reading prior to this included Goldensohn et. aL,1987; Haykin, 1987; Johnston et.al., 1987; Lim and Moore, 1987; Ross et.al., 1987, Serageldin, 1 87; Sines et.aL, 1987; Warren, 1986; Wedemann et.al., 1987; Wilcock et. aL, 1987;the World Bank, 1986 and 1988. Liberalization and Food Security inMali 5. See Dione and Staatz, Market (1987), in which they report onresearch conducted in Mali on theimpact of price support interventionsfor domestically producedgrains on farmers located in various ruraldevelopment zones.

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JOI-N P. MASON

INTRODUCIION

The world is becoming irreversibly urbanized. As we approach the 21st century the dominant demographic trend we seebesides world population growth itselfis urbanization. While an issue of some concern to the U.S. Agency for International Development (A.I.D.) as well as to the U.S. Congress, urbaniza- tion is a complex and little understood process. It continues unabated, ata very rapid pace, and differently from the way towns and cities have evolved in the West. In the developing countries, urbanization is not inevitably linked to overall national economic growth and development.

A.I.D., other donors, and developing country governments needa better grasp on the contribution of town and dty formation to national growth. At the policy level, knowing the direct impact of economic and social policieson a country's human settlements is critical to national planning.Understanding urbanization's role in national growth is also essential in developing effective country development strategies. On the program and project level, designing interventions in areas such as rural production, requires knowledge of the pivotal part played by rural-urban linkages, especially market town development.

9 4 79 80 This paper contends that there has been a rural-urban "divide" in the A.I.D. approach, in other donor agencies, and in developing country govern- ments. The "divide" consists of a growing anti-urbanbias and the perception that urbanization is somehow "bad." As we will see, urbanization in some casesdoes contribute effectively to overall national economic growth and development.

In both theoretical and development work contexts of urbanization, the anthropologist has creative roles to play. These roles range from theorizingabout the urbanization process to implementing interventions which affect that process. This paper will review those contexts in some detail, followedby a brief discussion of where and how anthropologists can make acontribution to understanding urbanization and to influencing development programsdealing with urbanization.

BACKGROUND

Development agency work in rural and urban development i3 reMirdsCorlt of a divorce. The symptom is a growing "rural-urban divide" indonor agency bureaucracies. While the opposition of rural and urban is artificial, theboundaries of the two areas have become entrenched in most donor agencies.As a rural-based strategy became the focus of most development activity, interest in urbanization faded. The result was an impoverished understanding of the role of urbanization in development, in which this process came to be viewed more and more distantly as some undefined,umnanageable "problem." Urban issues were perceived as having little to do with rural development issues. Theresult was a large gap in knowledge and understanding of the rural-urban linkage.

Clearly there are exceptions to this "rural-urban divide" in A.I.D. as well as other development agencies (Booth et al.1984). This paper builds on A.I.D.'s and, to a limited extent, other agencies' efforts to build on understandings about both rural and urban development. It is fror- ouch experience andknowledge that we come to understand how rural andurban forces of growth affect one another.

Interest in the rural-urban dynamic is partly a reaction to the tendency by some to narrowly characterize urbanization in the developingcountries as a "problem" (Lipton 1977). It is also motivated by frustration withsingle-focused, rural strategies that are often treated as if they embodied thesole solution to national development. Today urbanization is being increasinglydefined as integral to the national development process and as intimately bound to rural development (London 1987). 81

THEORETICAL PREMISES OF URBANIZATION

A key concept in this paper is the rural-urban linkage, whichis defined as the movement and exchange of people, goods, money, services, and ideas back and forth between rural areas and urban centers, including smalltowns core narrowly, it is the flow of 4gricultural inputs, services,products, and money between farms and towns through the medium of the market.

While rural-urban exchange is rooted in the agriculturalsector, it is assumed, following Mellor (1986), it spreads growth and jobsoutside of that ol sector, creating more linkages. In Mellor's view, specificelements of the rural-urban linkage provide the basis fora successful agriculture- and employ- ment-ba ied strategy. These elementsare provided by communications and transpo t infrastructure and by regional urban centers with high employment potential. Such regional urban centersare often small towns, which, if they are functioning effectively, generate demand for farm products, offerjob possibilities for farm and town populations, and functionas centers for agricultural supply (Rondinelli 1987).

A qualification to the rural-urban linkage definition,one that will be discussed more fully later in the paper, is that not all connectionsbetween rural and urban environments are beneficial to all populations affectedby those connections. One example is rural-urban linkages thatserve elites, often urban elites, in economically exploiting small agricultural producers.Another is linkages that commercialize agriculture and,as some social scientists contend, put the survival of the poor who reside in low-resource agriculturalregions at greater risk than they already face, by subjecting them to the whim ofmarket forces (Rondinelli 1987).

While the major impetus for rural-urban movementor exchange is viewed as economicincluding jobs,procuciion, income, marketing, and consumptionit is heavily shaped by social factors, suchas the organization of people involved in exchange Type of community, extensionof kinship system, household organization, division of labor byage and gender, and solidarity and degree of sharing among social groupsare some of the social features that shape linkages. Also critical is infrastructure, including roads,marketplaces, and communication systems. Political-administrativearrangements and health arid education services also provide an imporeint glue for linkage.Ultimately it is in these kinds of conditions surrounding economic exchange,the so-called "conditioning environment" (Bendavid-Val et al. 1988), not in themechanics of trade or commerce itself, that development interventiouswill be made The urbanization process is, of course.very much a part o' this conditioning 82 environment and must be analyzed and planned for in developing rural-urban linkages.

The vantage point from which rural-urban linkages are viewed in this paper is urbanization, which is defined as the process by which a country's population changes from a predominantly rural to an urban way of life. Urbanization is measured by an increase in the proportion of a nation's population living in towns and cities. Urbanization thus differs from urban growth, which is simply the rate of increase in size of an urban population (Davis 1972; Singlemann 1984). Urbanization is a critical though, within A.1.D., poorly understood part of national growth and development, and it therefore requires greater attention. By the same token, because the Agency's strategy to date has had a rural base, the rural side is much better understood than the urban. This is evidenced in numerous reviews of rural and integrated rural development efforts (e.g., Binnendijk 1988; Chambers 1983; Honadle and VanSant 1985; Kumar 1987; Moris 1981).

A final caveat is the term "urban" itself. Virtually every country uses different definitions to classify its population into urban and rural components. In computing statistics, ihe United Nations expects national definitions to distinguish urban areas from rural areas (UNCHS 1987). For example, many African nations define as urban those localities with 2,000 or more population. Ethiopia uses 2,000 as its lower limit, while Nigeria defines as urban, towns with 20,000 or more inhabitants whose occupations are not mainly agrarian. In Latin America, Peru defines as urban populated centers with 100 or more occupied dwellings. In Asia, India defines as urban a town that possesses specific municipal administrative bodies, while Japan uses 50,000 inhabitantsas its minimal definition. Some nations stipulate a minimal number of persons per hectare or square kilometer, and others me such criteria as the presence of secondary schools, government and private offices, or mills and factories. The point of all this is twofold: first, comparisons of data on urban populations between countries and regions must be treated with care, and second, when the term "urban" is used here, it may refer to any settlement from the smallest rural town to the largest megacity. Where it is relevant to the discussion, an attempt is made to differentiate among these definitions.

Urbanization in the developing world today is qualitatively different from urbanization as it occurred in the West. This is particularly se in low-or no-growth countries, where rapid urbanizaiion is occurring at much lowerper capita income levels than for Western countries in comparable periods (Hamer 1985; Mohan 1976). In some developing countries, urban growth is happening at almost alarming rates of speedalarming '1 the sense that the most rapid urban 83

growth often occurs insome of the poorest countries with the lowestresources and least capacity to generateproductive work and income in urbanareas.

Urbanization and "Progress"

The development profession'sview of urbanization has changed significantly over theyears. Up to the mid-1,60s, urbanizationwas tied to modernization, a process thatwas assumed to include the elimination ofa society's "traditional" or "backward"elements (Gusfield 1967). Socialor political difficulties accompanying rapidurbanization were viewedas merely transi- tional--a byproduct of becoming modern(Bienen 1984). During that time, itwas the developing countries' urban-basedpublic policies that shaped decisionsabout use of national resources. As a result of thosepolicies, surpluses from agriculture and livestock were often transferredto urban investment; food priceswere subsidized; and distribution of publi Irvices, facilities, and infrastructure decidedly favored ul'--nareas. General effects were an overemphasison the modern, formal sector andan increasing gap between rural and urbanincome levels.

As the focus of developingcountry urbanization shifted, however, the "progress" model became unworkable.Many of the criteria of modernizationwere relatively absent from the developingcountry urbanization process, including such benchmarks asa productive agriculture sector, industrialization,formal emplfwment, and balanced rural-urbandevelopment (Abu-Lughod andHay 1979). The differences in the evolutionof Wectern and developingcountry cities, and especially the extraordinarygrowth rates among the urbanpoor, began to gain increasing attention.

A Growint Anti-urban Bias

Later ideas about modernizationtended to depict migration and urbanization as undesirable. By thelate 1960s and early 1970s, developmenttask group pronouncements (Pearson 1969; Prebisch1970) distinctly downplayed the role of urbanization in nationaldevelopment. As a result urbancenters were characterized, not asa focus of development but, as a place where ruralsurplus labor ends up, unemploymentoccurs, and social tensions abound. Thenew urban poor were seen as a drain on developing nationsand as belonging primarily back on the farm (Goldstein 1983). Poor urban migrantswere also depicted as a drain on the city because, with their involvementin unskilled, unproductive work,they 84 ultimately ended up in "slums of despair" or"cultures of poverty." Thus emerged the stereotype of the urban poor aspeople ensnared hi a tradition of poverty, incapable of contributing to urban life andtherefore marginal to the moderniza- tion process (Perlman 1987).

Paralleling the inability of internationalassistance agencies to pinpoint the most effective place for theirinterventions in urban development wasthe tendency of national governments to casttheir urbanization problems too narrowly (Terzo 1971). Problems weredefined as sector issuesfor example, housing or community servicesor as resourceneeds, such as infrastructure or subsidized shelter projects. Developing countryproposals presented to donor agencies for funding of urban sectoractivities were therefore very narrowly defined and focused on specific urbanproblems. Recently, the urban poor are no longerbeing described as a f eeting appearance on the road tobecoming modern. Rather, they are seen as afixed part of the urban landscape, thereby coiningunder scrutiny in light of their role in carrying much of the burden of urbaneconomies as well as their potential for fostering revolutionary action (Bienen 1984).Even the image of the urban poor as a revolutionaryforce has shifted, so that currently manydevelopment specialists consider them to be no more or lessrational than urban elites, adapting as best they can underworsening socioeconomic conditions, and asserving an indispensable economic function in underdevelopedeconomies (De Soto 1987; Nelson 1979). However, the anti-urban bias that arose inacademic and international assistance agency circles in the 1960s and1970s is still with us (Lipton 1977; Cohen 1979; Booth et al. 1984). The strongurban bias seemed in need of redressing, and the 1973 New Directionslegislation and the resultant AID, rural-based strategy were attempts to correct thesituation. Even the new policies were not entirelysuccessful, however, as they had the seeminglyunintended effect of emphasizing the rural-urbandynamic--which is now beginning to be recognized as very important for overallnational growth and development.

URBANIZATION AND ITS RELATIONSHIPTO NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The literature reviewed for this paper revealed noclear distinctions about types of urbanization as theyrelate to development. Therefore it wasdeemed useful to develop definitions of two distinct typesof urbanization, which differ according to the way in which each is associatedwith national economic growth and development. Representing extremesof the urbanization process, most of 85 which occurs on a continuum lying between the two types, th', typology is heuristic and intended to help clarify the issue of how best to harness that process for national development purposes.

Type 1is urbanization with development. It occurs when national economic growth and development are present, including a national policy that integrates economic and spatial planning, a productive agricultural sector, growth of secondary cities and market towns, and manageable levels of rural-urban migration. Type 1 urbanization takes place in developing countries experiencing an increase in the proportion of urban to rural population at the same time as there are increases in agricultural production and incomes and in urban employment, productivity, and incomes. Type 1 favors a dynamic agricultural sector, which in turn leads to prosperous secondary cities and market towns.

Type 2 is urbanization with limited development. It occurs where overall national economic growth and development are inadequate to meet the needs of a growing population. Other features of this type of urbanization include the lack of a national policy that integrates economic and spatial planning, underproduc- tion in agriculture, "overmigration," growth of megacities, and the relative absence of intermediate cities and towns. In contrast to Type 1, Type 2 urbaniza- tion occurs in countries in which there is an increase in prop 3rtion of urban to rural population, but also an absence of adequate agricultural production increases, job and income growth, and viable secondary cities and market towns. Furthermore, in countries experiencing Type 2 urbanization, cities become increasingly populated by the poor who are unable to improve either their employment possibilities or their incomes.

Worldwide Urban Population Trends

In countries in which Type 2 urbanization occurs, the constraints have often been historically determined. In physical terms, the spatial arrangements in the developing countries were formed to fulfill the trade, commercial, and political requirements of the colonial powers (McNulty 1987). Thus, regional and national economies were bypassed, creating a distorted pattern of urban settlements and an imbalance in the distribution of rural and urban settlements.

Policies in developing countries have reinforced rural-urban imbalances, as present population and urbanization data show. When projected to the future, these data suggest significant trends for both developing country urban growth and urbanization. The United Nations Population Division (1986) has made the following projections on the tvsis of its biannual country analyses of urban and rural populations: 86 Urban population increases will occur most rapidly in the developing countries in the next several decades.

Developing countries' urban populations are expecte i to be fully 50 percent of their populations in the next generation or so.

Developing countries' urbanization levels will begin to approach those of the developed countries by about the year 2020.

These trends might convey a favorable picture if the industrial world pattern were serving as the model. When measured against the world's poorest countries and regions, however, they are a cause for alarm. In countries such as India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zaire, or Kenya, for example, growth in the number of megacities tends to draw resources from rural areas without much return benefit to rural producers. Furthermore, the major portion of urban growth in most developing countries is due to natural increases in the birthrate rather than to rural-urban migration. This means that continued rural-urban migration will only worsen a situation in which the larger cities have enough to cope with given their own, already high, natural population growth rates. One recent sign of optimism is that as economic realities change in poorer countries, more and more migrants are heading to the intermediate cities, cities the provide a means of building or maintaining che rural-urban balance (UNCHS 1987).

Regional Urbanization Trend

The world's major regions are characterized by clear differences in rates, levels, ind types of urbanization. ihese differ. nces are summarized in the following generalizations, whichit mmt be stres,eddo not necessarily hold for all countries in each Tegion:

In Africa, countries will experience a high, 4-5 percent rate of urbanization in coming decades, but generally in the absence of adequate overall national development, especially with regard to jobs and urban infrastructure.

In the Near East, countries will undergo urbanization skewed toward a growing concentration of urban people in the largest cities. 87

In Asia increasingly there will bedifferences in type of urbaniza- tion from one country to thenext: low-income countries will experience very high levels of urbanization,while middle-income countries will undergo less rapid,more balanced urbanization.

Latin America will havean extraordinarily high level of urban- ization but without the kind ofeconomic growth characteristic of the West.

Of the major regions, Sub-SaharanAfrica and South Asia give themost reason for concern. These two poorest subregions in the worldcould one day supportas much as 50 percent of the globalpopulation, and of that amount, fullyhalf would be living in cities. While Africa,Asia, and Latin America showsignificant differences in rates, levels, andtypes of urbanization, they doshare certain characteristics. For one, in low-incomedeveloping countries, the proportionof rural to ,irban population ismuch greater than for middle-or high-income countries. For another, megacitiesare present in all regions. For supercities generally, the question of whether theyare desirable or technically feasible looms large on the horizon; it willnot be long before the world hasseveral major metropolitan areas of 25-30 millionpeople, many of whom will bepoor and not productively employed.

NATIONAL FACTORS IN URBANIZATION

This section brings togethersome of the major factors involved in the processes of urbanization and national developmentdescribed above for the regions. Its purpose is to set thestage for a discussion of rural-urbanlinkages in development.

The Link of Urbanization, Migration,and Development

National development is basedon the connection of three important factors: migration, urbanizatiou, and development (Timberlake andKentor 1983). An imbalance in these factorscan throw that entire process, includingthe rural-urban balance, out of kilter.Such a linkagecan be witnessed most emphatically in countries wherean "urban explosion" is essentially transforming a nation from an agrarian toan industrial service economy (Rogers and Williamson 1982). In suchcases the net flow of migrants fromrural to tirban areas can be quite closely correlated to thelevel and rate of economicgrowth 88

(U.N. 1980).As Ledent (1982: 537) wrote,urbanization is a function of a population transfer from rural to urban areasin response to "spatial imbalances between labor supply and demandduring the course of modernization (industrialization)". Certain other studies,however, link migration to rural poverty rather than tonational development (UNCHS 1987).

Theories of Migration: ContrastinsViews

In developing countries,individual households respond toeconomic incentives in choosing places towork. What is still being debatedis how household members decide to migrateand where to go, and why theycontinue to migrate to the city inthe face of growing urbanunemployment. Economis's Harris and Todaro (1970)and Gugler (1982) agreed that potential migrants take into account notonly rural-urban income differences but also the probability of obtaining.irban employment. The Harris-Todaromodel proposed that migrants try to guessthe expected differences inrural-urban income and to hedge their betsaccordingly. Thus, according to thismodel, rural-urban migration continues theoreticallyuntil the relative chances for a potential lob diminish to a pointapproximating zero.

Research on where rural migrants end upin the urban economy suggests they may either become a drag onthe economy or, at the opposite extreme, provide a stimulating force (UNCHS1987). On one hand, migrants are seen to contribute to underdevelopment,straining the resources of the city toprovide jobs, shelter, infrastructure, andurban services. Because migrants come tocities where poverty already exists,conventional wisdom has generallyassumed that they only aggravate urbanproblems because of their increasednumbers and lack of skills.

On the other hand, recent researchhas indicated that rural migrants often make a positive contribution to thesocio-economic life of the city (Goldscheider 1983). That research points to young,highly self-selected, and ambitious representatives of the rural poor whosemigration to a smaller, then larger, city results in competition by which theurban-born are being nudged higher upthe socioeconomic scale. This perspectiveviews the city in the devPlopingworld as a modernizingforce, making cosmopolitans outof rural migrants. 89 National POliCY and Human Settlements Development

National economic and social policies havea direct impact on a nation's human settlements. National policy thatdirectly effects income and employment, for example, has additional effects, inturn, on the settlements. In addition,as the Habitat report (UNCHS 1987: 93)on human settlements suggests, "Policieson imports, on the value of thecurrency, on the gtowth of industrial and agricultural output, and on the distribution of investmentsbetween sectors all affect, sometimes in unintended ways, the developmentof human settlements."

As this economic policy-human settlementslink is becoming better understood, some countriesare making efforts at the policy level to integrate economic goals with human settlementsplanning. Such an integrationmay result in a better spatial distribution of people andeconomic growth, aimed at reducing regional and local inequality. On the otherhand, it may result ina set of policies that mobilize resources to deal with highpopulation growth rates and urbaniza- tion that might otherwise causesevere employment, housing, and urban services problems.

KEY DIMENSIONS OF RURAL-URBAN LINKAGE

The nature of rural .urban linkages is aboveall situational, dependingon where and under what conditions the linkagesoccur. Linkages are different from one another, for example, depending on whether theyoccur in low-resource and subsistence agricultural regions, commercializingagricultural regions, or urban regions. Where urbanization is of Type1 (with development), rural-urban linkages actively contribute toa dynamic marketing system, while for Type 2 (limited levelopment), they donot generate opportunities for increased employment and income generation.

The situational character of rural-urbanlinkages is especially evidentat the level of small and intermediate urbancenters in rural areas. Given thatevery such center has itsown peculiar mix of resources, skills, and development potentials (Bendavid-Val et al. 1988), itsties with the surroundingarea, including regional and national economies,are bound to be more or less unique. This is the case even where two towns in the same region havea similar population size. Thus, locai or situational factors mustclearly be considered in the design of development interventions that aim topromote a greater dynamic in the rural-urban linkage. 90

Key Dimensions

Since the rural-urban linkage seems not tohave been systematically defined elsewhere, this paper develops aninventory of what appear to be the most important dimensions. Thesedimensions are (1) economic-technological, (2) spatial, (3) infrastructural and services, (4)financial-administrative, and (5) key organizational players. While economic forces aredeemed to have the greatest influence on rural-urban exchange, the other"conditioning" factors are critical to how viable and sustainable that exchange canbecome.

The economic-technological dimension includes ruraland urban demand, production, and employment/income. It consists ofbackward and forward flows between predominantly rural agriculture and mostlyurban industry, including production, exchange, and consumption of each other'sproducts. Rural and urban demand and production are seen as generating exchangesthat drive economic growth and development. Rural nonfarm employment and incomegeneration are important ingredients of the economic-technological aspectof rural-urban linkage. Under the spatial dimension, towns and small secondarycities are highlighted for their place as links in the rood marketing chainbetween rural and urban markets and as centers of innovation and diffusion,especially technological and financial. Infrastructure and servicesinclude all the means of keeping things and ideas moving (market, transport, roads, waterand sanitation systems, communications systems), and people fed, healthy, andeducated so they can go about their business and be productive. These different,physically-based systems play a critical part in keeping the rural-urban flowdynamic.

The financial-administrative dimension consists offinancial institutions for savings, investment, and credit for ruralproduction in the broad sense. In addition to financial resources for agriculturalproduction, this dimension includes services, marketing, manufacturing, and commercefor off-farm and nonfarm production. This dimension is divided alongpublic and private lines in that some of the critical services and infrastructuiein rural areas (such as irrigation, roads, and central marketplaces) are financedby public sources, while private sources finance the private sector for thefunctions associated with the food marketing chain. The last dimension consists of the key organizationalplayers. They are the persons who in their specifk roles keep thelinkages linked. They produce the surplus crops, broker the sale, lend the money, process thefood, market the produce, drive the trucks, earn an income, buy theproduct, spend their cash. These key players also highlight some of thepoints where development 91 interventions can be made in orderto enhance the growth of rurai-urban exchange.

A BRIEF REVIEW OF A.I.D. EXPERIENCE IN DEVELOPINGRURAL-URBAN LINKAGES

Over the last 15 yearsor so, A.I.D. has experimented with severalrelated approaches to developing existingpatterns of exchange between urban andrural environments. These approachesconsciously aim to capture andcharm& the energies that reinforce both rural andurban devolopment. In certaincases, AID. has been able to assist developingcountries in forging linkages betweenrural and urban communities.

Resource Management Approach

It is in the degradation of naturalresources that the ecological balance between urban and rural conditionsis perhaps most readilyobservable (Brown and Jacobson 1987; Sachs 1986).One response by A.I.D. Bureaufor Science and Technology's Office of Rural andInstitutional Developmentto increased pressures on scarce resources, high energy costs, andrapid urban population growth MEREC or is the Managing Energy- andResource-EfficientCitiesapproach (dendavid-Val 1987b; Sood andRogers 1983). The MERECplanning process is designed for secondaryor smaller cities with much of their growthand expansion ahead of them. In one demonstration city, Tacloban, thePhilippines, project elements included landuse planning, a water distributionsystmi, solid waste management, a slaughterhouse bio-gasplant and oxidation ponds,electricity efficiency, urban farming, a traffic plan, and training and publicawareness activities. Besides creatingnew job and income opportunities, MERECcontributes to improving the quality of life ofa city's residents by adapting its institutional capacity to creatively managea new set of human-environmentalconditions.

Regional Development Approach

The predominantly rural-basedstrategy that A.I.D. developed in theearly 1970s led to the use of a sort of "hybrid" terminology for discussingrural-urban linkages. The Office of Ruraland Institutional Developmentused such terms "regional analysis and development," as "urban functions in ruraldevelopment," "rural market towns," and"secondary city development"to define the economic role of cities or towns inincreasing agricultural productivityand rural incomes 92

(Rondinelli 1980, 1985; Rhoda 1982).Use of those terms has continued tothe present.

Specifically, regional development andanalysis concentrates on cities and metropolitan areas, including their size,place, and economic functions, within range from more encompassingregional or subregional contexts. Its concerns geographically based studies of poverty tohousehold-level income surveys. While A.I.D.'s effort in building on therural-urban dynamic has rarely gone bythe name of "regionaldevelopment," the Missions andregional bureaus have implemented a significant number ofprojects that are essentially of that type.This effort reflects a gradual shift in theAgency's regional activities, especiallyin the Asia/Near East and Africa regions, tourban development issues, but notissues of megacities and metropolitan areaswith all their perceived problems.Rather, the shift has been to urban centersthat serve important ..conomicfunctions for rural areas, functions that are not soreadily apparent in the case of megacities. of Regional development specificallydirects attention to the economic functions those secondary cities andrural market towns that are capable ofsustaining and being sustained by rural,agriculturally productive regions (Bendavid-Val1987a; Rondinelli 1987). The regional approachunderscores de,elopment of multisectoral linkages, city-city or city-town(interurban) connections, and interregionalties. It requires a more complex planningorganization than project designers are accustomed to, including multidisciplinaryresearch on numerous multisectoral needs and spatial conditions. In Sub-Saharan Africa A.LD.has gradually turned to a regional orientation, in which the prioritieshave been to address problems ofdeclining food production and very rapidpopulation growth (Clark University1988). Interventions there include agriculturalproduction and urban income-generating projects. The regional developmentapproach has permitted A.I.D. Missions in Africa to channel some resourcestoward urban-regional conditions while remaining within the framework ofrural development and expertise.Because organizational planning complexities andlimited financial resources prevent application of this approach acrossthe board to a developing country'snational development needs, Missions haveuseditmainlyfor production and income-generation projects.

The regional development approachcontinues to be applied today, though modified and newlyclothed. It is no longer as broad), based asthe original approach, in that it focuses onsubregions, district-level areas, or even subdistricts. 93

Urban Functions in Rural Development and Market Town/SecondaryCity Development

One effort to decentralize investment and authority alongspatial hnes in order to promote growth outside of large cities and metropolitanareas was the Urban Functions in Rural Development project (UFRD), sponsored bythe Bureau for Science and Technology's Office of Rural and InstitutionalDevelopment (Rondinelli 1980). UFRD built on the concept of rural-urban interdependencyand especially the important role of market towns in rural development. UFRD defined cities as service providers to ruralareas, and rural areas as providers of agricultural products for marketing in towns and cities.Applied in several demonstration projects in the Philippines, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon, UFRD provided an analysis of the degree of linkage of ruralareas to regional centers. While heightening local planners' awareness of the importance of spatial factors, UFRD did not result in planning and investment decisionsin A.I.D.- assisted projects partly because these factorswere seen by development experts as too "top down" (Karaska and Belsky 1987). Recently the focus of UFRD has been narrowed to two critical aspects of the rural-urban dynamic: (1)market towns and their place in marketing specific agricultural products and(2) secondary cities as producers of goods and services for ruralcommunities, sources of employment, and stimuli for agricultural production.

Most developing countries have too few small towns andintermecl. cities (Rondinelli 1984). Where such urban centers do exist,they rareiy 1-ay.. sufficient public services or job opportunities to absorb ruralmigrants and, therefore, they cannot readily contribute to regional economic growth.One result is that migrants from labor-surplus rural areasare forced into already over-satu- rated megacities, while rural regions lose many of the better educatedand more productive people. In this context market towns play theimportant role of stimulatingrural economies throughtheincreased commercializationof agriculture (Rondinelli and Rudd le 1977). The Office of Rural andInstitutional Development has supported studies of the place of market towns ina rural-urban strategy that underscore the role of these towns asa stimulus for agricultural production and income growth (Bromley 1984; Carrollet al. 1984: Gihh 1984; Hackenberg and Hackenberg 1984).

The Office of Rural and Institutional Development hassupported a study (Rondinelli 1987) of the rural-urban dynamic that focuseson marketing as the most important linkage between rural areas, towns, and cities. Morespecifically, marketing linkages are defined as being critical in agriculture,employment, and enterprise development. From this perspective, A.I.D.'s bestinvestment is seen as lying in improvement of rural-urban marketing systems inareas undergoing a transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture through developingbasic

1 94 market-support infrastructure. Examples of such infrastructure include on-farm andcommercialstoragefacilities,basictransportationfacilities,and farm-to-marl-et and inter-market roads that give farmers greater access to market towns and small cities. The critical issue in developingmarketing linkages is not whether, but how, government should use its resources in promoting growthand diversification of agricultural economies. The study recommends that wherethe private sector is unable to provide services and infrastructure or where poor households would have little access to the market, public resources should be used. Secondary cities combine economic, social, and physical traits of both rural and urban contexts, an important fact for A.1.D. strategy consideration. Commerce and trade, manufacturing, and provision of urban services are common features in such cities, althoughscale is of course much smaller than in megacities. That a significant portion of their population works in agriculture or agriculture-related activitiesis a factor they have in common with rural communities. The Office of Housing and Urban Programs and theOffice of Rural and Institutional Development have supported studies of secondary city development (SCD) (e.g., Rondinelli 1983a, 1983b, 1983c; Van Huyck et al. 1985) that demonstrate the importance of certain understandings about the SCD process. First, SCD will not cure the poverty and"overurbanization" of the more problematic megacities. Second, social and economic objectives rather than, for example, preconceptions about "hierarchies of urban place" should drive SCD. Third, basic infrastructure is a precondition for SCD. Finally, implementation of SCD should be decentralized and involve local stakeholders.

The UFRD and SCD approaches represent A.I.D.'s continuing effort to maintain the integral role of the urbanization process in national development. They are in effect refinements and recastings of the earlier regional development approach. Their results were initially generalized plans for regional rural-urban development, plans that proved difficult to use for investment purposes. Subsequently these approaches were narrowed to focus on the role of marketing linkages and especially the market town in promoting economic growth and development. The offspring of UFRD and SCD is the even more tocused and therefore more specific SARSA approach.

Settlement and Resource Systems Analysis

The Settlement and Resource Systems Analysis (SARSA) approach (A.I.D. 1988; Clark University 1988), sponsored by the Office of Rural and Institutional Development, aims to provide understanding of land settlement issues, natural resources management, and the rural-urban dynamic. Itis also used to advise 95

USAID Missions, some of whichmay be prepared in the near future to support development projects basedon SARSA's regional economic findings, analyses, and recommendations. Following the leadof the Government of Kenya, A.I.D. is supporting a strategy of local investments that buildon development prospects of small towns and secondary cities tiedto areas of expanding agriculture. Specifically, the strategy focuseson applying scarce resources to develop infrastructure in rural centers selectedas the best prospects for agricultural production and related activities suchas processing, manufacturing, and services. A.I.D.'s purpose is to support analysis foruse in shaping interventions in the selected region, develop baseline data for futureevaluation purposes, and assist in developing guidelines for the Kenyan rural-urbanbalance policy. It is expected that this evolving approachcan Je applied elsewhere in Kenya.

SARSA has evolved from a somewhat macro-orientedapproach rooted in a regional development tradition. It hasbeen narrowed and refined, resulting inthe highly specific, household-based researchmethodology. A highly promising approach for A.I.D.-assisted rural-urbandevelopment, SARSA is still at the stage of basic research but is moving closerto providing a framework which can serve as the basis for an investmentstrategy. The apparent drawback to SARSA isits heavy reliance oh intensive, household-levelresearch that generates data of a highly situation-specific nature. Asan experimental method it has much to commend it, althoughto standardize it for use as an investment strategy might prove difficult given the variabie characterof local, subregional socioeconomic conditions within, and especiallybetween, countries. One possibility is that the general principles SARSAhas derived from its researchon rural-urban exchange could be operationalized ina rapid reconnaissance format in order to speed up their applicationto project development.

City as "Engine of Growth"

The idea that the urban center, in thiscase the city--in contrast to the rural market townis the engine of national ecunomicgrowth, while certainly not a new idea, has recently gained some currency througha report supported by A.I.D. Bureau for Private Enterprise's Office ofHousing and Urban Programs (Bendick 1984). According to that report, urbancenters offer greater economic efficiencies be"ause their population concentrationis so much greater than that of rural areas. The report further describes the roleof secondary cities and market towns in raising rural incomes. In contrast to approachesdescribed earlier, however, the focus of this approach is noton the reciprocity of rural and urban factors but rather on thearena of competition between different types of urban centers. The type of urban development envisionedaccording to this approach

110 96 w...uld take place in smaller cities and market townslying in areas of expanding agriculture.

In support of the "city-as-engine"perspective on national growth is the fact that some industries are reluctant tolocate outside of metropolitan regions, despite public initiatives for industrialdecentralization programs. This perspective maintains that the provision of industrialinfrastructure in itself is the wrong incentive, so long as firms do not see theadvantages in terms of production and market efficiencies. Therefore, the selectionof cities for SCD would have to be based on strici measures of economicefficiency and comparative advantage. Now prominent in A.I.D. is an alternativeapproach that stresses policy reform necessary to get dynamic growth started(based on agriculture/compara- tive advantage). Such reform, whichfocuses mainly on freeing markets and prices in favor of agriculture and economicefficiencies, is juxtaposed, by way of example, with infrastructure projects.Tending to favor that thinking is the evolving strategy of the Office ofHousing and Urban Programs, by which assistance is directed at helpingdeveloping countries to deal with the growing complexities of urbanization. Included in that strategyis assistance in developing national housing finance strategies, land useplanning policies, local mobilization of finance, and improved municipal management(Clark University 1988). In addition, such Office of Housing andUrban Programs activities as studies of issues and opportunities in Africanurbanization (Abt Associates 1988) refleci a concern with some of thelarger questions surrounding national urbandevelop- ment.

ISSUES FOR CONSIDERATION BY DEVELOPMENTANTHROPOLOGISTS IN HELPING A.I.D. BRIDGE THE RURAL-URBANDIVIDE

The discussion of a continuum between two extremetypes of urbaniza- tion that may occur in developing countries,presented at the beginning of this paper, points to the needfor a strategy to influence and therebybenefit from the urbanization process. The A.I.D. approaches torural-urban development sketched earlier demonstrate a gradually evolvingwisdom about linkage and exchange, and underscore the necessity for acomprehensive strategy that harnesses the mutually reinforcing energies of rural and urbandevelopment. The need for such a strategy represents apossible opportunity for anthropologistsgiven their particular skill in demonstrating the relevanceof micro-level information and understandings to macro-level processes and vice versainboth the theoretical understanding and implementation of policiesand programs bearing on urbanization. The perspective anthropologists have of thelarger system combined

I1 I 97

with their attention to the players who makeup the system provides them with an opportunity to affect die outcomes of policy deliberationsabout urbanization.

Since the policy andprogram implementation arena is furtheraway on the time horizon, the remainder of thispaper will focus on points anthropologists might consider in makingan impact on urbanization theory.

Within the realm of theory of urbanization,some of the major issues raised in this paper concern the generalrole of urbanization in fostering national socioeconomic growth and development.Other issues concern more specific elements of the urbanizationprocess, such as its part in promoting or inhibiting rural-urban linkages and, in turn, the place ofthose linkages in wealth generation. Yet other issues pertain to A.I.D.'s needto develop an approach to urbanization that will best permit it to leverage the distributionof national wealth along spatial lines.

Anthropological Understandings of Urbanization

In correcting a perceived urban bias,donor agencies have in recent decades adopted a rural-based developmentstrategy. That strategy resulted in the neglect of urbanization's contributionto development and a mental association of that process with "problems." Examplesof questions in this domainto which anthropologists might have some advantage inresponding are: What new paradigm willcome into being that will reduce today's 'rural bias'?

What stimulus will triggera renewed interest in the role of urbanization in.,onal development?

What strategies are appropriate for low-incomecountries, where migration plays the dominant role inurbanization?

What strategies are appropriate formiddle- and high-income countries, where natural birthrateincrease is the dominant player?

Strategic Issues

There are several alternativeways to deal with a developing country's urbanization trends. Any strategic levelconsideration must take into account the 98 type of urbanizationthat is, whereit is along the continuum between Type 1and Type 2. If Type 2, urbanization with limiteddevelopment, prevails, then more emphasis should be placed on addressingsuch policy-level issues as rural or urban bias, "overmigration," megacities,and a general rural-urban imbalance.

If Type 1, urbanization with development,is prevalent, then an approach that emphasizes issues specific tourban development, such as municipal management, finance mobilization,and land use policy, would seem appropriate. That approach, presently used by theA.I.D. Office of Housing and Urban Pro- grams, directly addressesthe issue of the cost of urbanization(A.I.D. 1984). Although experts have known all along thatthat cost is enormous, it was W. Arthur Lewis (cited in Linn 1982) whoperhaps stated the problem most plainly anei forcefully: "Urbanization is decisivebecause it is so expensive." Reflecting both the concern with cost and thekinds of needs occurring in Type 1 urbaniza- tion, A.I.D,'s role in the urban sectorhas been to assist in providing cost-effective methods for planning, budgeting, operating,and maintaining cities.

As was noted at the outset of this paper,the differences between Type 1 and Type 2 approaches were purposelyoverdrawn for purposes of emphasis. In fact, because there may be a mix of the two typesof urbanization within a single develop;ng country (although one usuallyprevails), a specific country might well require a blend of the approaches sketchedabove. Such a determination should derive from the USAID Mission's procedureof arriving at an appropriate Country Development Strategy Statement.

Tactical Issues

The issue of the representativeness andstandardizability of data collected under SARSA has implications for A.I.D. resources.The detailed, household level of research called for by SARSA'smethodology puts a definite strain on time, personnel and expertise, and money. Althoughthe methodology is defined as experimental at this stage, the fact is that itbuilds directly on theories and methods that A.I.D. has used for almost 15 years.The findings, though to a certain extent new, are not revolutionary,given our understandings of rural-urban development generally. Whatthe SARSA methodology does potentially do for A.I.D. program development,however, is provide a much higher level of specificity about rural-urbanexchange and balance than earlier approaches. And in that respect it could be aneffective planning tool for A.I.D. 99 Future Needs in A.1.D

While modest advancesare presently being made in rural-urbanlinkage development through limitedprograms carried out in individual Missions,more experimentation of a selected kind isrecommended. The shape and directionof the effort are, as described in this paper, presently provided under the rubricof SARSA. SARSA is already beingundertaken in selected Missionsin Africa, the region also in greatest need of bothrural and urban Lievelopmentassistance. What is underscored here is thatthe rural-urban linkage shouldbe isolated for project/program development andJesign purposes in the Agency ina clear-cut and forceful manner.

CONCLUSION

A.I.D. has a limited hut growingexperience in the area of rural-urban linkage development. What itrequires for further advancementin this area is a better understanding of theurbanization process. The importanceof developing country urbanization is clearly becomingrecognized. As the two types of urbanization defined in thispaper show, urbanization may insome cases become a critical stimulus for national development,while in others it is a symptomof underdevelopment. In eithercase, more knowledge is essential for creatingmore effective development strategiesor for improving existing strategies to fosterType 1 urbanization. Anthropologists can play a clearcut role in helping to buildthe appropriate knowledge base. Where theyare part of the developmentprocess, urban anthropologists with theappropriate bureaucratic skills mighteven play a role in applying that knowledge to thedevelopment of urbanizationpolicy, programs, and projects.

NOTE

1. This paper was presented inabbreviated form at the AmericanAnthropo- logical Association AnnualMeeting, Washington, D.C., November17, 1989. It is adapted from a report (Mason 1989) prepared for theU.S. Agency for International Development(A.1.D.), Bureau for Policy and Program Coordination, Centerfor Development Informationand Evaluation. The author, who wishesto acknowledge AID. for itssupport of this paper, accepts soleresponsibility for its content. 100

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NOTE

1. This paper was presented in abbreviatedform at the American Anthro- pological Association Annual Meeting,Washington, D.C., November 17, 1989. It is adapted from a report(Mason 1989) prepared for the U.S. Agency for InternationalDevelopment (A.I.D.), Bureau for Policy and Program Coordination, Center forDevelopment Information and Evaluation. The author, who wishes toacknowledge A.I.D. for its support of this paper, accepts soleresponsibility for its content.

1 GENDER ISSUES IN MICROENTERPRISE ASSISTANCE

MARI H. CLARKu

INTRODUCTION

Foreign assistance to stimulate the economic growth of microenterprises' in developing countries is an area where the links between human andmacro- economic/political factors should be evident and integrated intopolicies, programs, and project design. However, most past analyses and a fair amount of assistance have focused on firms and finance rather than on entrepreneurs and their networks.4

Analysis of gender issues' in development assistanceis inherently anthropological because it directs attention to people and then to critical socio- cultural differences, such as gender, which affect development results. The challenge of addressing gender issues in microenterprise assistance isone of focusing attention on male and female entrepreneurs, viewed in the context of the various social, political, and economic institutions that constrain or enhance their entrepreneurial endeavors.

There has been an ongoing debate among development practitioners around the question - what is the best economic development mod,1 to guide microenterprise assistance? Within that debate, other questions have emerged such aswhat are the most effective means of assuring women's access to that assistance? And, is that really necessary?Some have argued for a poverty alleviation focus, which includes a concern for the importance of women's income for family welfare. Others have argued for a growth-oriented strategy, insisting that .he limited resources and inability to generate growth in many developing countries necessitate targeting of resources toward subsectors with the greatest potential for economic growth (Downing 1990).

109 r) 110

In her review of this predominantly economic literature, Jeanne Downing points out basic misunderstandings about women and microenterprise that have been the unintended by-products of the wider debate. On the one hand, most proponents of a growth-oriented approach have assumed, erroneously, that all women in development (WID) researchers advocated a welfare approach i.e. subsidizing women's low-cost, low return enterprises. This misinterpretation was based on the abundance of WID studies, at the household-level, which document the importance of women entrepreneur's income to family welfare. On the other hand, most WID proponents have ignored the contributions of growth proponents to the documentation of women's participation in specific subsectors and their influence on policy and development strategies. This was because many of those concerned about women in development had focused on the potentially detrimental effects of growth oriented strategies on women without exploring possible benefits (Downing 1990). As Downing argues, these approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive and, in fact, elements of both are essential. The new research agenda for A.I.D.'s (the Agency for International Development) microenterprise program builds on the assessment of constraints and incentives that keep women in low- return enterprises. But it goes beyond that to assist women in entering higher return product markets with greater potential for generating income and increasing economic growth (Downing 1990).

This is supported by A.I.D.'s Women in Development policy which stresses the importance of women's contributions to the goal of national economic growth (A.I.D. 1982). It is also consistent with current thinking reflected in recent seminars on the state-of-the-art of microenterprise assistance. These generated recommendations such as: re-thinking the notion of microenterprise program sustainability in terms of social benefits as well as economic cost effectiveness in the longer term; recognizing the heterogeneity of enterprises and entrepreneurs; and increasing the understanding of the policy and regulatory environment that affects the efficiency of men's and women's microenterprises (Clark 1989; Nathan Associates 1989).

Although anthropologists have conducted studieF of entrepreneurs, the growth of firms, and the effectiveness of rotating credit groups, unless they have been directly involved in development program and project activities, their insights have remained largely within the halls of academia and have not informed these efforts.6

While it is important for development anthropologists to help to improve models for stimulating sustainable economic growth of microenterprises and improving the lives of people, it is also valuable to apply their analytical skills to

1 7 5 11

the various levels of the institutional context ofdevelopment assistance. That is, while anthropologists and other social scientistscan help identify what is needed for whom; they also canassess what is the best path through the bureaucratic mazeway to make those interventions happenmore efficiently and effectively. The remainder of this article focuseson the latterthe institutional contexts that ultimately affect male and female microentrepreneur'sopportunities to benefit from foreign assistance.

After a discussion of the rationale for lookingat gender issues in microenterprise assistance, the article examinesone layer of the institutional environment of microenterprise assistance- the policy, systems, and procedures of the donor agency.Another important layer that interfaces withthe donor bureaucracy is the operating environment (policiesand regulations) and the organizational dynamics of the implementing institutionsfor microenterprise assistance in the host country (see Blumberg 1989a,Otero 1987a, 1987b).

At the base of this are the local roles and rulesfor economic exchange between women and men within and between households.A large part of the gender and development literature focuseson this household and community level and provides valuable andnecessary information for sustainable micro- enterprise program and project design (for example,see Dwyer and Bruce 1988).

WHY WORRY ABOUT WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS?

A.I.D.'s Women in Development Policy is basedon the assumpt: that "The key issue underlying thewomen in development concept is ultirn j an economic one: misunderstanding of gender differences,leading to inadequate planning and designing of projects results indiminished returns on investment" (A.I.D 1982). In other wards, it makes good economicsense to take women into account in microenterprise assistance policy,programs, and projects. Women play a significant role in microenterprise but their economic contributionsare limited by serious obstacles to be discussed shortly.

Microenterprises typically constitutea large portion of the economy in less developed countries, operating generally inthe informal sector.' Women make important economic contributionsto this part of the economy as entrepre- neurs, employees, producers, processors, and tradersas well as their unmeasured, "invisible" domestic service inputs in providing food,fuel, and water for their families; performing domestic tasks; and raising,feeding, and educating their children.8

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The economic importance :)1 women entrepreneurshas been stressed in numerous recent studies such asthe International Labor Office (ILO) assessment of entrepreneurship of women indeveloping countries (van der Wees and Romjin 1987), a special issue of World Developmententitled "Beyond Survival: Expanding Income Earning Opportunities forWomen in Developing Countries" (Grown 1989), Women's Ventures: Assistance tothe Informal Sector in Latin America (Berger and Buvinic 1989), and a report onWomen and the Wealth of Nations prepared by Blumberg for the A.I.D. Office of Women inDevelopment (Blumberg 1 989a).

Official surveys generally have missedthe kinds of businesses that women run or simply havedefined them out of existence.Reliable data on women's actual levels of employment,unemployment, income, and overall contribution to national economies are poor orlacking in developed as well as developing nations. Many working womenhave defined themselves or have been defined by interviewers; as unemployedhousewives; published employment and business data seldom have beensex-disaggregated (See Dixon-Mueller and Anker 1988; U.N. 1989, Waring 1988). Growing numbers of women are setting uptheir own tiny businesses, largely in the informal sector. This is theresult of increasing labor participation of women in the context of nationaleconomic crises with budget deficits and growing unemployment, the limited absorptivecapacity and difficulty of entry into the formal sector, the rising costof living, and the growing percentageof households world-wide which are supportedsolely by women (Berger 1989, Collier 1988, Grown and Sebstaed 1989, vander Wees and Romjin 1987).

Microenterprise activities in the informal sector areimportant sources of income for women because of the easeof entry, more flexible hours and location of work, and fewer skills required thanin larger businesses in the formal sector. Formal sector employment opportunitiesfor women are often limited to marginal jobs with low wages, few fringebenefits, poor working conditions, and little chance for advancement (Berger 1989,Grown 1989, Tiano 1988).

However, informal sector livelihoods offer no accessto social services or employment benefits and often entailharassment and demands for bribes from officers of the formal system on the groundsthat they lack official registration for their operation (Ward 1990). Women-ownedenterprises are usually among the smallest and poorest and comprise a large partof the informal sector, particularly in urban areas.In most settings, women's labor andbusiness efforts are characterized by the invisibility of female economicroles, their part-time and intermittent careers, and the c:ose relationshipbetween their business and family

127 113

activities and resources (Downing 1990, NathansAssociates 1990, van der Wees and Romjin 1987).

There is now clear evidence thatwomen who do have access to the benefits of microenterprise assistanceprograms perform as well as or better than their male counterparts in generating employmentand operating their businesses. They generally perform better thanmen in repayment of their loans (Bluriberg 1989a, 1989b, Otero 1989).

Some studies suggest that womenare more likely to invest their income in the human capital of their children, forfood, clothing, and educationexpenses, than are men who tend to spenomore of their income on themselves, for items such as entertainment and clothing (Blumberg1989a). Women's employment and entrepreneurial activities also providea safety net for households during times of economic crisis (Clark 1985, Downing1990).

Wpmen entrepreneurs facemany obstacles. Lack of capital, insufficient training 4nd experience, as wellas economic and technical prob:ems and high transaction costs for joining the formal sectorare faced by poor entrepreneurs in general.Women encounter additional obstaclessuch as: limited access to vocational training, particularly in high-productivityareas; lack of access to capital factors; extremely limitedaccess to informal financial and information networks; legal barriers to owningassets or land or independently establishing a business; economic and technological factors whichpressure women to enter the labor force but restrict themto low-productivity sectors; and institutional barriers which limit women'saccess to support services provided for small enterprises (Buvinic and Berger 1989, Downing1990, Otero 1987a).

Not suprizingly, given their differing constraintsand opportunities, male and female entrepreneurs oftenpursue different kinds of enterprise growth strategies based on gender specific motivations andconstraints. Women generally diversify their portfolio of businesses inorder to reduce risk, rather than specializing in a single activity and realizing theassociated increase in productivi- ty and value added. Wheremen make risk-taking investments, women tendto invest in more secure ventures to spreadthe risk of their husbands' activities (Downing 1990).

Desa women's g:eat numbers and economic significancein the microenterc ise area and their extra burdenof constraints, assistanceto microenterprises does not automatically benefit thewomen owners or employees of these tiny businesses.Projects may focus on sectors wherewomen are not employed; service institutions may lack capabilitiesto reach and assist female clients; training may not includewomen or discuss special needs and qualities of

I S 114 female entrepreneurs; training materials maynot be gender sensitive;outreach may not target women(Clark 1989, Nathan Associates 1990,Otero 1987, van der Wees and Romjin 1987).

THE INSTITUTIONAL SETTING As Britan and Cohen have observed,bureaucracies must cope with internal pressures and tensions amongtheir component parts and interact with an external environmentwhich can propel them to extinction(Brawl and Cohen 1980:18). It is within this environmentthat development policies, programs, and projects are born and raised orburied. Characterizing this context,Kathleen Staudt titled her most recent bookWomen, International Development, andPolitics: theBureaucratic Mire. Analysis of the variouslevels of this critical institutional context can help the developmentplanner learn from past mistakes in order to identify and circumvent potentialbureaucratic obstacles to men's and women's participation in development efforts such asstimulating the growth of small and microenterprises (See Hoben 1982, Staudt1985, 1989).

Tracing the recent institutional historyof the integration of gender issues into small and microenterpriseefforts in the Agency for InternationalDevelop- ment provides a good introduction tothe systems and procedures therein asthey affect the pathways by which A.I.D.assistance can reach the male and female entrepreneur. Particularly strikinghas been the constant change in the parameters of A.I.D. operations in response tocongressional pressures, interest groups, shifts in foreign relations, and changesin agency leadership. This historyalso documents the sustained levelof effort required to institutionalizegender awareness andanalysis for a specific sector in ade% elopment assistance bureaucracy (see also Staudt 1985, 1989).

In recent years A.I.D. has become aleader in the donor community in both women and developmentand microenterprise development assistance. A.I.D.'s significant action in both areasbegan during the period of the "New Direction" legislation and the "humanneeds" emphasis of the 1970's, described in the Introduction to this volume. Although A.I.D. provided some assistance tosmall businesses in the infrastructure-building 60s,it was the microenterprise researchefforts and demonstration programs of the 70sthat showed that small-scale enterprises offered possibilities for growth indeveloping countries that have been underesti- mated or ignored by developmentpractitioners. 115

This challenged traditional assumptions abouteconomic development that were based on export growth models and reliedon the formal sector to absorb labor in the wage economy. It suggested thatcapital-intensive approaches to developing industry were more costly,not very productive, and difficult to sustain in developing countries. A.I.D. efforts showedthat small sc:ale enterprises were important components of rural nonfarm and urbaneconomies that generated significant employment and value added.It also provided a model of assistance through private voluntary organizationswhich could help local nongovernmental organizations to help smallentrepreneurs (Liedholm and Mead 1987, Hull 1989).

A.I.D.'s Small Enterprises Approachesto Employment (SEAE) project which began in 1978, aimed to identify approachesand design programs to improve employment opportunities and enhance theviability of small enterprises. One of the projects under the umbrella ofSEAE was PISCES (Program for Investment in Small Capital Enterprise).PISCES investigated methnds for providing assistance to enterprises ownedby the poor.It was guided by the assumption that the poor would benefit from smallleans and small amounts of technical assistance (see Ashe 1985a and 1985b).

The ARIES (Assistance to Resource Institutionsfor Enterprise Support) project followed PISCES in 1985. Incontrast to the poverty alleviation thrust of PISCES, ARIES focused onmanagement efficiency, cost effectiveness, and financial self-sufficiency. ARIES aimedto strengthen the capabilities of support institutions in developing countries to implement small-scaleand microenterprise development programs (see Rhyne 1988 and Hull 1989for further discussion). Explicit attentionto the integration of gender considerations in microenterprise development began during the ARIESproject Some background on A.I.D.'s Women in Development Policy is needed to explain how andwhy this came about.A.I.D.'s Women in Development Policy is basedon the Percy Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act whichrequires that U.S. bilateral assistance programs:

...be administered so as to give particularattention to those programs, projects and activities which tend to integratewomen into the national economies of foreign countries,thus improving their status and assisting the total developmenteffort (A.1.D. 1982).9

The Office of Women in Developmentwas established within A.I.D. with the responsibility of guiding the Agency in the integrationof women in development assistance and reporting to Congresson its progress (A.I.D. 1982, Staudt 1985).

ro 116

Implementation of the Women in Developmentpolicy did not proceed rapidly in the bureaucratic environmentof A.I.D.An evaluation of the institutionalization of WID policy in AID., donein 1987, concluded that "AID's Women and Development Policy is notbeing implemented fully or vigorously and there is little enthusiasm and few incentivesfor doing so." Personnel within A.I.D.'s Bureaus and Missions viewedthe A.LD. WID policy only as areaction to special interest politics, not as aserious development concern. Fieldmissions varied greatly in willingness to integrategender issues into their programs and projects (Development Associates1987, see also Staudt 1985). Concerned about the slow pace at whichthe integration of women into A.I.D. programming was advancing, in1988, Alan Woods, the Administrator of the Agency at that time,issued an action memorandum toall senior staff requiring that A.I.D.: Ensure that country strategy, program,project, nonproject assistance and reporting documentsexplicitly describe strategies to involve women, describebenefits and impediments to women's participation in development andestablish benchmarks to meas.ire women's participationin and benchmarks from development activities. Collect sex-disaggregated data on all itsresearch or data-gather- ing activities.

Develop WID action plans for all bureausand field missions.

Train A.I.D. personnel about women indevelopment, particularly in agriculture, natural resource managementand environment, and private enterprise including smalland micro-scale enterprise. Increase women's inclusion in participanttraining programs (Raney 1988).

In 1989, in response to interest group pressure,Congress further amended the Foreign Assistance Act to requirethat A.I.D. incorporate women as beneficia- ries of and contributors to its developmentactivities at the level proportionate to their participation in the sector or theirrepresentati n in the total population, whichever is higher. Five million dollars ofthe FY 1989 funds allocated for A.I.D. development assistance were earmarked' for womenin development activities.

During this same period, in response to interest groupcharges that U.S. foreign assistance was not doing enough to assistthe poor, Congress enacted 117

legislation in 1988 requiring that "not less that$50,000,000. shall be made available for programs of credit and other assistancefor microenterprises in developing countries." The 1989 appropriations increased theearmark to $75 million. The conference report accompanying theappropriations legislation suggested that special attention was to be given to businessesowned by women and businesses owned by the poorest 20 percent ina country (A.I.D. 1988, Hull 1089).The "A.I.D. Microenterprise Development ProgramGuidelines," develo: ed by the newly establishedMicroenterprise Advisory Committee inOctober 1988, identified women-owned and operatedenterprises as an important group that should be given access to at least 50percent of microenterprise assistance urces in credit, technical support, and training (A.I.D. 1988).

The A.I.D. Office of Women inDevelopment already had identified microenterprise as a priority area and hadfunded the conference that generated the papers in Women's Ventures (Berger andBuvinic 1989) and commisioned the preparation of guidelines for integratingwomen in microenterprise assistance activities Gender Issues in Small Scale Enterprise(Otero 1987a). Following the 1988 legislation, the Office has also playedan active role in the A.I.D. working group on microenterprise which has representation from all thebureaus in the agency.

In 1989 A.ID. conducted a stock-taking of itsmicroenterpri se activities for its report to Congress and inresponse to concerns expressed by the Micro- enterprise Advisory Committee (Hull 1989). Asa result of the active participation of WID office staff in the design andreview of the stock-taking effort, the results were gender-disaggregated.

The stock-taking concluded that A.I.D. usedthree different approaches to microenterprise assistance aimed at threetypes of beneficiaries. Women entrepreneurs were heavily clustered inone of the three typesassistance aimed at the world's poorest in the survivaleconomy. This approach provides technical assistance and credit to help entrepreneursstart and operate microenterprises. The fewest women were reached byassistance aiming to transform micro- enterprises into larger businesses withmore growth potential. This approach provides larger amounts of credit, training,and technical assistance. Assistance directed toward improving existingbusinesses also reacheda considerable proportion of women (see figure one).The stocktaking report also showed that the proportion of women beneficiarieswas highest in those A.1.D.- supported programs that: (1) specifically targetedwomen, and (2) targeted assistance to urban commercial microentrepreneurssectors having relatively high rates of female participation (Boomgard 1989).

1 2 Women and the Growth of Microenterprises

Formation Expansion Transformation

Women , Men

Data Source: Boomgard, James J.1989. A.I.D. Microenterprise Stocktaking: Synthesis Report. Washington, D.C.:A.I.D./CDIE. Graph Source: 1991. Women in Development:A Report to Congress by theU.S. 3 Agency for International Development.Washington, D.C.:A.I.D./PPC/WID. I I . 119

During 1989, the W1D Office alsocommissioned an assessment of the ARIES project to provide guidancefor the next major A.I.D.microenterprise initiative, the Growth and EquityThrough MicroenterpriseInvestments and Institutions (GEMLNI) project (Clark1989). Like many other projects ofits era, ARIES lacked a strategy forensuring women's access to relevantmicroenterprise assistance. The project design requiredneither gender analysisnor collection of gender disaggregated data during thelife of the project. Few datawere collected to enable of assessment of theextent to which women participatedin and benefited from these projects,even those with specific WID cornponents. 11

LESSONS LEARNED FROM ARIES Involving Women in MicroenterpriseAssistance'

Sector selection for research Tar. .ce sectors where and TA excludes areas where wot,.1 are employed women work.

Local customs and institutions Work with local people to limit women's participation. assess women's roles and constraints in each location to determine how to best inte- grate them.

I lost country policies and Policy dialogue should pres- regulations limits women's ent evidence of productivity participation. lost; where possible, involve women in policy dialogue.

Project staff donot collector Budget funds for gender data use gender disaggregated collection analysis and pro- data. vide TA; orient staff to gender analysis.

Missions do not request inte- Be more proactive about im- gration of women in Micro- portance of using gender enterprise scopes of work. analysis in projects to improve outcomes.

(Clark 1991)

The process of conducting the ARIESassessment also served to increase the attention given to gender in theactivities undertaken during theproject as well as afterwards. Some additionaloperational recommendationsfor improving the effectiveness of microenterprise assistance and increasing women'saccess to it, discussed during ARIES workshops,included collecting gender disaggregated baseline and project impact dataon entrepreneurs (Clark 1989). 120

The ARIES assessment recommendationswere incorporated inthe design for the GEMINI project as a resultof collaboration between staff inthe Office of Women and Developn.ent andthe Office of Rural Developmentwhere the document was prepared. TheGEMINI project began in 1989 andwill continue through 1994.13 In addition totechnical assistance and managementtraining for service organizations, the GEMINIproject also has a research agendaaimed at increasing understanding of the growthand dynamics of microenterprises atthree levels: the macroeconomiclevel; the industry or subsectorlevel, and the microeconomic level of the enterpriseand entrepreneur.

Gender considerations are integratedinto this agenda, with particular attention to incorporatingfemale entrepreneurs into nationaleconomic growth processes. This will beguided by economic analyses ofmarket demand, input supply systems, and competitivenessto identify the low-return,low potential subsectors that women now occupyand to identify the growthsubsectors in which women have a comparativeadvantage. Gender analyses will identifythe constraints and incentives thatlimit women's movements into moredynamic markets. Prior to this, neither the womenin development nor the growth approach (noted earlier) had addressedthis important point (Downing 1990).

Evidence of the effects of the effort toinstitutionalize gender consider- ations in AID. microenterpriseassistance appear in A.I.D.'s 1989-1990Report to Congress on Women inDevelopment. Itstates that: "Worldwide,USA ID Missions have integrated women into a greatvariety of small and microenterprise projects, sometimes relyingsubstantially on assistance from the WIDOffice and on key supportprojects, such as GEMINI"(A.I.D./WID 1991). For example, the field missionin Honduras supports severalsmall and microenterprise credit programs withflexible loan requirements that offer women opportunities to obtain financial resourcesotherwise unavailable to them. There has been an increase in the percentageof women borrowers from 59 percentin 1988 to 67 percent in 1990 (see figure, page121).

Similarly, in the Dominican Republic,the percentage of small business loans to women increased from42 percent in 1989 to 51 percent in1990 (see the figure, page 121). Gender disaggregatedbaseline data show that 40 percent of the microenterprise owners in the country are women.

To enhance women's businessopportunities in Malawi, a project supported by the A.1.D. Missionhelped establish the National Associationof Businesswomen. This nongovernmentalorganization will have a strong voice in promoting changes in institutionalpractices and policies that do notpresently benefit women.

o Increase in Women Borrowers Small Business Loans Supported by Two USAID Missions Percent 67 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1988 1990 1989 1990 Honduras Dominican Republic

Source:1991. Women in Development: A Report to Congressby the U.S. Agency for International Development. Washington,D.C.: A.I.D./PPC/WID. 117 122 In Bangladesh between 1982 and 1988, the Women's Entrepreneurship Development Program made over 10,000 market interest rate loans to about 9,000 women for entrepreneurial activities. 82 percent of the project employees were women.

The Financial Institutions Project, established by A.1.D. in collaboration with the Government of Indonesia in 1984, provides very small loans ($36-$120) and slightly larger loans (averaging $400). The participation of women in the very small loan program is higher than in the small loan program (53 percent versus 24 percent) due to the lack of collateral requirements in the former and the availthility of loans for working capital. The- project has demonstrated that, when properly designed and administered, p, oviding credit to poor and female entrepreneurs can be an effective way to stimulate business development (A.I.D./WID, 1991).

GENDER AND THE FUTURE OF MICROENTERPRISE ASSISTANCE

The shift in perspective from viewing women in development as a special interest to recognizing gender a, an economic issue in microenterprise develop- ment assistance shows significant progress toward integrating people and recot,nizing human diversity in the A.I.D. development assistance agenda. Getting this far has required careful analysis of the possible pathways through the bureaucratic mazeway, taking into account congressional oversight and the interests of various constituencies.

The initial support from the Administrator of A.I.D. was critical to set the institutionalization process into motion in a broad sense. '1This support and that of the heads of Agency bureaus were actively pursued and gained by the Office of Women In Development. Howevei this support had to be constantly main- tained and reinstated with personnel changes. The WIT-) action plans required by tlAdministrator provided a mechanism by which to help bureaus and missions to identify ways to integrate women into microenterprise and other program areas.

Interest groups contributed by providing pressure on congressional staff to specify women as an important group that should receive a fair share of the microenterprise assistance specified in the legislation.A few members of Microenterprise Advisory Committee also provided strong support. The interest groups continued to apply pressure on A.I.D. to ensure that women would benefit from the Agency's microenterprise assistance programs. 123

The technical expertise and activeparticipation of WID office staff inthe Agency working groupon microenterprise and support from staff in otheroffices working on microenterprisewere essential to affect Agency policy, while making the case for the importance of genderto key decision makers.

Using the earmarked funds, theWID office provided genderanalysis training and technical assistance formission staff in integrating genderinto mission project andprogram design and thus carried the institutionalization process out into the field. This includeda significant amount of technical assistance on project designs andmonitoring systems for microenterprise assistance. In the field too, thesupport of mission leadershipwas critical to initiate the institutionalization of genderconsiderations in field operations. By providing funding for specificactivities and by participatingvery actively with the centrally funded GEMINImicroenterprise project officers and staff,the WID office expanded the pool of peopleintegrating gender in technical assistanceand research on microenterprise.

The establishment of WIDworking groups in the Agencycreated a network for widening theacceptance and utilization of gender issues byAgency decison-makers at all levels.

Mechanisms for the institutionalizationof gender in A.I.D. development decision-making are in place, particularlyin the area of microenterprise. However, the process is far fromcomplete. The mechanisms forinstitutionaliza- tion need to be maintained and refined.Many new challenges lieahead, particularly in the area of monitoringand impact evaluationsystems that take into account gender considerationsand track gender disaggregatedindicators (see Britan in this volume).

In summary, women playimportant roles in microenterprise butoften assistance in the past left themout, failed to take into account theirspecial constraints and skills, or treated themas welfare cases rather than as entrepre- neurs. Institutionalization of gender considerationin A.I.D. strategic decision- making about microenterprise assistanceis essential to ensure that femaleas well as male entrepreneurs have the opportunityto use development assistanceto improve their lives and those of theirfamilies. Integratingwomen into micro- enterprise projects andprograms requires careful analysis of the differentlevels of the institutional environmentin which men andwomen operate, including that of the donor bureaucracy.However, this is a longterm process. It requires: persistence in maintaining support fromAgency leaderships; gender analysis training for awareness and skill building;active participation in Agencydecision- making groups, building network3of Agency technical staffwho use and promote gender analysis; perAiasivetechnical assistance; integration ofgender 124 disaggregated data collectionand analysis in Agency systemsof reporting, monitoring, and evaluation.It is clear that a great dealhas been accomplished and that many challengesremain.

INSTITUTIONALIZING GENDER INMICROENTERPRISE ASSISTANCE

Procedures and systems must be establishedand carried out to ensure regular considerationof gender concerns in the overall A.I.D. and host country development processes. Program and Project design must integrate womenand provide indicators for monitoring progress towardthat goal during project implementation and in projectevaluation. policy dislogue must examine the extent towhich the policy and regulatory environmentdifferentially affects men's and women's options and productivity. People must demonstrate sensitivity to genderdifferences in constraints and opportunities and recopizehow women's integration can contribute to broad baedsustainable economic growth; Practices and traditions of local people,regarding gender roles, rnsut be understood, respects, andbuilt upon. Converseiy, it is important to examine the culturalassumptions and preconcep- tions carried to the host countriesand to assure that they are not in conflict with theeffective integration of women in activites in that setting.

NOTES

Development 1. The author is a consultant tothe Agency for International (A.I.D.) Office of Women inDevelopment, through Labat Anderson Incorporated. The views expressed inthis article are those of the author. They do not represent either theAgency for InternationalDevelopment or Labat-AndersonInc. Melody Bacha, Ross Bigelow, KayDavies, 2. The author extends thanks to Jeanne Downing, MichaelFarbman, Tulin Pulley, and TomTimberg for their comments on an earlierdraft of this paper. 125

3. According to the "Microenterprise Development Program Guidelines" of the Agency for International Development, there is no precise definition foa microenterprise.The working definition given is that micro- enterprises have no more than 10 employees. Special emphasis is placed on small-sized and individually-owned productive activities. But this definition does not exclude community-based firms suchas poor women's cooperatives with 20 members (A.1.D. 1988).

4. See Grmovetter 1990 for a detailed discussion of the history and logic of the neoclassical economic theory of the firm's exclusion of the entrepre- neur and the social ties that affect his or her business dealings. He also discusses examples of models from the anthropological literature which are better suited for analyzing the social embeddedness of the economic action of the entrepreneur. See also Granovetter 1985. See Acheson and Wilson's use of the New Institutional Economics to develop a model for the growth of firms that takes into account social factors which affect market efficiency and organizational costs, which in turn affect capacity to use technology, capital, and human resources.

5. Gender refers to the socioculturally defined economic and social roles of men and women, as distinguished from sex which refers totheir biological differences. Gender analysis refers to the systematic assessment of gender-related factors (such as male and female roles, responsibilities, and access to and control over productive resources) in terms of theways in which they may affect and be affected by development policies, programs, and projects (see Carloni 1987, Otero 1987, White et. al. 1986).

6. See for example: Acheson and Wilson 1989, Barth 1963, Bohannan, Paul and George Dalton eds. 1962, Firth and Yaney 1964, Geertz, 1962, Shipton 1989. See Granovetter 1990 for a review of a good part this literature.

7. The informal sector refers to the unregistered, uncounted businesses that operate outside of the formal economic and lega; system, such as money lenders and street food vendors. While many of the business in the informal sector are microenterprises, the two terms are notsynonymous. One is defined in terms of the relationship of businesses to the formal institutional framework; the other by size of enterprise. Debates continue about the nature of this sector and whether itreflects economic or institutional maladies of the formal system.

8. For further discussion see: Berger and Buvinic 1989, Blumberg 1989, Chen 1989, Clark 1985, 1986, 1990, Commonwealth Secretariat 1989, Dixon-

e 126

Mueller 1988, Downing 1990, Grown 1989, Otero 1987,Reifenberg 1990 b, Schultz 1990, U.N. 1989.

9. See Staudt 1985 for an excellent and detailed accountof the political maneuvering that was done to put the Percy Amendment inplace.

10. Earmarked funds are those set aside for specific uses. In theFY 1991 foreign aid appropriations to A.LD. by Congress, in addition to women in development, funds were earmarked for agricultureand rural nutrition, population, health, AlDs, education andhuman resource development, private sector, environment and energy,international disaster assistance, the economic support fund,microenterprise, the development fund for Africa,and other assistance such asdisplaced children, victims of war and biocEversity. A.J.D. is required to report on these earmarks and demonstrate that the funds were spent asintended by Congress.

11. Out of 37 ARIES technical assistance activities toA.I.D. field missions, only six had WID components, that is, the scopeof work included activities assisting or evaluating the integration of womenin their programs. An additional eight providedgender disaggregated data or discussed gender constraints and opportunities (Clark 1989).

12. See also: Berger and Buvinic 1989, Downing 1990,Grown 1989, Otero 1986, White et. al. 1987.

13. The GEMINI Project aims to: (1) increase the output andefficiency among existing and new microenterprises, leading to increasedincome and employment for owners and workers; (2) enhance theeffectiveness of microenterprise assistance programs and policies carried outby AID microenterprises in developing countries through expert services;and (3) provide leadership in A.I.D. for microenterprise developmentassistance. 127

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Liedholm, Carl and Donald Mead 1987 Small Scale Industries in DevelopingCountries: Empiri- cal Evidence and Policy Implications.East Lansing Michigan:DepartmentofAgriculturalEconomics, Michigan State University. MSU InternationalDevelop- ment Paper No. 2.

Mann, Charles K., Merilee Grind le, andParker Shipton 1989 Seeking Solutions: Framework and Casesfor Small Enterprise Development Programs. HartfordConn.: Kumarian Press. Nathans Associates 1990 Mainstreaming Women in MicroenterpriseDevelopment Programs; Workshop Proceedings. Otero, Maria 1987a Gender Issues in Small Scale Enterprise.Washington DC: U.S. Agency for InternationalDevelopment, Office of Women in Development.

1987b A Question of Impact: SolidarityGroups and Their Approach to Evaluation. New York, UN.Plaza: PACT (Private Agencies Collaborating Together).

1989 Breaking Through: The Expansion ofMicroenterprise Programs as a Challenge for Non-ProfitOrganizations. Cambridge Mass.: ACCION, MonographSeries No.4. Pulley, Tulin 1990 Management Systems in MicroenterpriseDevelopment: Implications for Women Entrepreneurs.Paper Presented at the ARIES Seminar on the Future ofMicroenterprise Assistance. 132

Raney, Laura A.I.D. Front Lines. 1988 Woods Sets Plan for WID Action.

Rhyne, Elisabeth Employment Project: 1988 The Small Enterprise Approaches to How a Decade of A.I.D. EffortContributed to ...e State of Knowledge on Small EnterpriseAssistance. Washing- ton D.C.: U.S. Agencyfor International Development, Office of Rural Development.

Shipton, Parker 1989 Bitter Money: CulturalEconomy and Some African Meanings of Forbidden Commodities.Washington D.C.: American Ethnological SocietyMonograph Series No. 1.

Staudt, Kathleen 1985 Women, Foreign Assistance, andAdvocacy Administra- tion. New York: Praeger.

Staudt, Kathleen, ed. and Politics,: the 1989 Women, International Development, Bureaucratic Mire. Philadelphia: TempleUniversity Press.

Tiano, Susan Capitalism: Third World 1981 Gender, Work, and World Women's Role in Development.In Analyzing Gender: A Handbook of Social Science Research.Beth B. Hess and Myra Marx Feree eds. NewberyPark: Sage Publications. Pp. 216-243. United Nations 1989 The 1989 World Survey onthe Role of Women in Development. New York: United Nations.Pp. 331-358.

van der Wees,Catherine and Henny Romjin Development for 1987 Entrepreneurship and Small Enterprise Women in Developing Countries:An Agenda of Unan- swered Questions. Geneva: InternationalLabor Office.

Vondal, Patricia 1991 Social and Institutional Analysis inthe African Economic Policy Reform Program andImplications for Future Analytical Needs. Studies in ThirdWorld Societies. 133 Ward, Kathryn 1990 Women, Work, and the Global Restructuring of the Economy. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Waring, Marilyn 1988 As If Women Counted: A Now Feminist Economics. New York: Harper and Row.

White, Karen, Maria Otero, Margaret Lycette, and Myra Buvinic 1986 Integrating Women into Development Programs: A Guide for Implementation for Latin America and the Caribbean. Washington D.C.: U.S. Agency for Interna- tional Development, Office of Women in Development. THE DEVELOPMENT FUND FORAFRICA: NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR ANTHROPOLOGYIN A.I.D.

DAVID W. HESS, PRD.*

THE DFA: BORN OF DISAPPOINTMENTAND FRUSTRATION

The Agency for InternationalDevelopment (A.I.D.) receiveda new mandate for its work in sub-SaharanAfrica with thepassage of legislation establishing the Development Fund forAfrica (DFA) in 1987 (Congressional Record, December 21, 1987). TheDFA is a special appropriation withspecific legal requirements governing all ofA.I.D.'s activities in sub-SaharanAfrica. The DFA was further codified and givenpermanent legal authorization in the Foreign Assistance Appropriation Act for FiscalYear 1991 which beganon October 1, 1990 (H.R. 5114).

The 1987 legislation eloquentlyexplained why Congress tookthe extraordinary step of "earmarking"or creating this special account:

The first twenty-fiveyears of independence has seen little real improvement in the quality of life forthe vast majority of Africa's people...The causes for Africa'spoor economic perfor- mance are:...the pursuit of inappropriate economicpolicies, often exacerbated by donors and adversedevelopments in the world economy over which African nations have littlecontrol; rapid population growth; recurring naturaldisasters and the resulting erosion of the natural resource base;resource constraints that have inhibited the full developmentof human resources; conflict and instability; and the legacies ofcolonialism (Congressional Record 12/21/87:H12674).

*The views and interpretations expressedin this paper are those of the authorand should not be attributed to the Agencyfor International Development.

135 ) I 136

The reasons articulated byCuagress were part of a generallyperceived failure by A.1.D. to make anymeaningful progress in improvingthe lives Africans. This perception was alogical culmination of the publicdebate about development going on in the1980's. Many writers, socialscientists prominent among them, havelong questioned foreign aid ingeneral and A.1.D.'s programs in particular, as seen inworks on dependency theoryand political economy. The debate of the 1980's wasgenerated by a reexaminationof our most basic foreign people, and develop- aid policies, goals, andcapabilities by politicians, business ment workers as well asacademicians.

Many observers saw thedevelopment record of the 1980's insub-Saharan effects of debt, famine, Africa as depressinglybleak. The social and economic failed policies, and lost economicopportunities hit country after country.It debt would be essentially became clear thatL. great deal of international financial system. unpayable, seriously threateningthe stabiiity of the international The demand for goods andservices dropped sharply,further straining world economic stability. African nations were hard hitby the combined effects of debtand natural disasters. Massive famine anddrought exacerbated by civil andinternatioral war overtaxing the led millions of Africans to leavetheir homes and become refugees, already precarious economies inreceiving countries. The internationalcommuni- ty responded with anoutpouring of volunteer actionand the collection of millions of dollars in privatecontributions.

Another indicator of the depthof public feeling about the crisesin Africa articuL .'d doubt about the utilityand effectiveness of foreign aid. was the clearly results had been The DFA legislation codifiedtile doubts about whether any achieved from millions ofdollars spent over almost threedecades in the pursuit of bettering Africans' lives.

DFA DEVELOPMENTASSISTANCE IN AFRICA: AIMED AT IMPROVINGAFRICAN PEOPLES' LIVES

In the early to mid-1980's manyAfrican governments and foreignaid organizations launched initiatives toaddress what was perceived as agrowing economic and social crisis.With the support of theInternational Monetary Fund's Structural AdjustmentFacilities and the World Bank'sStructural Adjustment Programmes andsectoral adjustment loans, African governments began to carry out economic recoveryprograms that drasticallyaltered the directions in which their economies wereheaded. Bilateral, or government to 137

government, donor organizations such as A.I.D. also supporteda wide range of broad economic policy and sectoral policy reforms.

Congress established the DFA, in part, to show thelong-term U.S. commitment to governments that were reforming theireconomic policies and political processes, and to allow theprogram in each countiy to be more responsive to local conditions:

The need for a process of long-term developmentin Sub-Saharan Africa that is equitable, participatory, environmentallysustain- able, and self-reliant remains compelling.To achieve these objectives..., there must be fundamental changes in U.S.assistance programs for Africa...an assured and stable source of funding for (development assistance in) Africa... and authorityto implement programs in Africa in a more flexible manner (Congressional Record 12/21/87:H12674).

These fundamental changes meant that A.I.D. facedan enviable but nonetheless complex challenge fora large international development bureaucracy - to rethink and reorient its basic objectives towards the achievement of meaningful, sustainable, and measurable improvementsin African peoples' lives. In order to refashion its organizatie- and proceduresto achieve and report on those objectives, A.I.D. defined four basicrogramming principles for DFA implementation:

Establish priorities among the African countrieswhere A.I.D. works by programming the bulk of its limited assistanceresources to those countries which: (1) are achieving tangibleprogress in redirecting management of their economies, (2) represent significantconcentrations of population, and (3) need assistance andare experiencing continuing difficulties in providing basic services to their peopleas measured by indicators such as infant mortality and literacyrates;

Focus on a limited number of problems in thosepriority countries in order to reduce the dispersion of its efforts andachieve meaningful results in improving African peoples' lives inthose countries where A.I.D. can make a difference;

Concentrate the resources which A.LD.can bring to bear (ie.its funding, personnel, and commodities)on those areas of focus where it is judged that A.I.D. can achieve meaningfulresults; 138 Measure, evaluate, and report resultswhich indicate A.I.D.'s perfor- mance in making adifference in Africans' lives.

A.I.D. developed a sub-SaharanAfrica plan of action which laid out an overall goal and four primary "strategicobjectives" for its development assistance in Africa through the early 1990's.The plan serves as a generalguideline for A.LD.'s field offices or missions to create acommon vision or,anthropologically speaking, a world view. The overallgoal is to achieve broad-based,sustainable, market-led economic growth. The strategicobjectives are: Improve the management of Africaneconomies by redefining and reducing the role of the public sectorand increasing its efficiency;

Strengthen competitive markets to provide ahealthy environment for private sector-led growth;

Develop the potential for long-term increasesin productivity and;

Improve food security.

In any given priority country, theA.I.D. program will most likely deal with only one or two of theseobjectives. The objectives selected areintended to reflect and make sense within thesocial, cultural, political, and economic dynamics, behavior, and institutionsof each country. Once they havedefined their strategic objectives, theA.I.D. missions develop their country programs applying the four DFA programmingprinciple:- 1) establish priorities, 2) focus on where they canimprove peoples' lives, 3) concentratetheir resourcc3 to make those improvements, and 4) measure,evaluate and report on their performance in achieving their objectives, and incontributing to the overall improvements in the well-being of that country'scitizens.

Before discussing how anthropologistsand other social scientists can contribute to A.I.D.'s work inimplementing the DFA, I want to reportbriefly on how the creators of the DFA, theU.S. Congress and their watchdog agency,the General Accounting Office (GAO),have rated A.I.D.'s initial efforts.At the request of Rep. David Obey, theGAO was tasked to assess howM.D. was implementing the DFA by investigatingchanges inA.I.D. behavior and performance in Washington andselected field missions. Performance was, as much as possible, to be judged onwhether A.I.D. was improving Africans' lives. Throughout 1990, the GAO performedthis general program audit. While the final report had not been published asof early 1991, preliminary findings were included in the House AppropriationsCommittee Report on Africa-related 139

portions of the 1991 Foreign AssistanceAppropriations bill.The Committee stated that they were encouraged by:

preliminary findings of the GAO thatsuggest the DFA has had a number of positive effects...including: improved project planning, more timely obligation of funds,a somewhat greater concentration of limited resources in thosecountries where economic performance is good,more innovative integration of project and non-project assistance by missions,greater attention to social and environmental impact ofprograms, and more effective coordination of DFAresources with resources provided by other donors, host governments,and non-governmental organizations (House Appropriations CommitteeReport on FY 1991 Foreign Assistance Appropriations Bill,p. 28,88).

The Committee noteu that the GAO feltthat A.I.D. was just starting to implement a system tomeasure impact of policy changes on development. The Committee expected A.I.D. tomove forward on this effort. It was clearly stated in the report that, while A.I.D. is working hardto make positive changes in Africans' lives, it has only begun to identifyand track those changes.

One measure, some say the ultimatemeasure, of Congressional interest in and judgment of U.S. governmentprograms is the funding it provides. By that yardstick, the Congress sentan unambiguously positive signal to A.I.D. when it provided more than a 40% increase infunding for the DFA in Fiscal Year1991 above what the Executive Branch hadrequested.

Foreign assistance traditionally hasvery little support from constituents or lobbies.Increases of such magnitude (more than40%) most often come in politically sensitive or pork barrelprograms. The Congressionally-mandated increase was made because "no otherregion in the world facesas severe a development crisis... (related to)poverty, hunger, low primary school enrollment rates, high infant and maternal mortality rates, highpopulation growth rates, and fast growing debt".The Committee report cited above foundthat "Africa's development crisis is deepening andpresents extraordinary challenges and the U.S. must play an important role in addressingthem".

While this somber rationale isno cause for satisfaction, Congress expressed general satisfaction, for themoment, with how A.l.D. is revamping its thinkir.g and behavior in order to bemore effective in attacking the tremendous problems of Africa in the 1990's.A.I.D. intends to continueto improve its performance in achieving and reportingon its impact on the lives of Africans, but 140 a real start hasbeen made. And social scientists canhelp A.I.D. make more progress in Africa as itworks with Africans to reverse thedismal trends and take advantage of the opportunities forbetter lives.

DFA PROGRAM PLANNINGAND MONITORING, EVALUATION,AND REPORTING: BRACHIATING THROUGHTHE OBJECTIVE TREES

To see where social scientists arealready contributing and where they can do more as A.I.D. implements theDevelopment Fund for Africa, I want tobriefly introduce how missions in Africa arechanging the way they conceive of the constraints to and opportunities foreconomic and social developmentin the countries where they work. The mainconceptual tool used is the objective tree, a graphic displayof cause and result which allowsplanners to pull apart and analyze the complex realities faced inAfrica. While the objective tree is a tool which can be considered simplisticbecause it is based on unidirectionalcausality and does not elegantly explicatefeedback relationships, it nonetheless isproving its worth for A.I.D. in Africa. The objective tree begins with a statementof either a problem or an objective (see Figure 1). Then youask how was that problem created orhow would that objective be acheived.The answers are placed at the levelbelow the first "box" or statement. As eachproblem or objective box is defined, youask what else can be identified as a causeat that levelwhat else answers the how question. As you keep identifying causes, youare looking for the necessaryand sufficient elements which lead tothe outcome stated in the box above.If you start at a lower level on theobjective tree, you ask so what orwhy as you work your way up anobjective tree in order tounderstand what the aggregated outcome of the various necessaryand sufficient elements would be.

The objective tree itself is not a newtool in the planning and management of A.I.D.'s development projects orof other organizations. For A.I.D., thefamous "Logical Framework" or projectlogframe contained an objective tree asits organizing principle (see Figure 2).Put simply, a partial objective tree in the "Narrative Column" of the logframeidentified the inputs provided in a project which produced outputs whichin turn ledto achieving project purpose contributing to achievement of theproject goal. Easily for- tten inapplying the project logframe was that all of the events orconditions . _sd in its "Assump- tions" column had to necessarilybe true in order to provide sufficientconditions to allow the achievements ateach level above. 141

DFA program planning in A.I.D.'s Africanmissions starts by building objective trees which identifyan overarching goal for development in that country and then disaggregates the necessary and sufficientelements required to achieve that goal.I will not review here the kinds of goalswhich have been identified in those objective trees exceptto say that they mostly all speak of achieving sustainable, broad-based, market-ledeconomic growth and improve- ments in the quality of life.The objective trees are eventually prunedas the A.I.D. mission constructs its Program LogicalFramework (see Figure 3).The Narrative Column is topped by the ProgramGoal, followed by any Sub-Goals, then the Strategic Objectives and Targets.This column focuses exclusivelyon those elements which the A.1.D.program will try to achieve. The other necessary and sufficient elements at each levelare included in a column just to the right of the Narrative so they will be readily rememberedand monitored. Indicators of progress in the achievement of each level are also identified,a point to which I want to return later.

is genuinely trying to identify all importantnecessary and sufficient elements which need to be changedor at least monitored as development strategies are planned, implemented, andevaluated, and as results are reported. This comprehensive approach iscongruent with the approach consideredone of the great theoretical underpinnings of anthropologyholism.A.I.D. develop- ment practitioners trained in anthropologyare dusting off that long-held way of seeing the world and presenting it to their colleaguesas the most effective way to see the messy and complex set of challenges andpossibilities in African countries. As noted above, perhaps the cyberneticthinking which has advanced anthropology's venerable holism makesobjectivetrees appear simplistic. However, tiiefact that annually $800 million of U.S.Government foreign assistance will be programmed accordingtoprinciples which are highly compatible with anthropological thinking indicatesreal improvement in foreign aid administration and confirmation of theutility of those principles.

ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND THE DFA: CONTRIBUTIONSIN PLANNING, MEASUREMENT, AND INTERPRETATION

There are at least two specificareas where anthropologists can contribute to the implementation of the DFA. The first is the challengeof holistic planning just discussed. There is no dearth of factors whichAID. traditionally considered related to macro-economic questions. Exchangerates, pricing regimes, trade and tariff policies, budget and fiscal questions,and the financial sectorare relatively well understood. Less clearare the social, cultural, and institutional structures, 142

behaviors, and values which framethe discourse and provide incentives forthe society in general.

A.I.D. has made partial progress inincluding these factors in its project design and implementation work,and is now, certainly in Africa, trying to understand them better in its overall strategyidentification discussed above. One specific means of providing thisinformation and analysis is through the Social and Institutional Profile (SIP).The SIP is a thorough-going reviewof social, cultural, and institutional questionswhich normally involves anthropologists and/or sociologists and political scientists at aminimum.The document provides background and directionsin A.I.D. for overall programstrategic planning and the filling in of objective trees aswell as project planning.

Anthropologists can alsocontributeto DFA implementation by participating directly in the strategicplanning of an A.I.D. mission. In the last two years( 1989-90), anthropologistshave been team leaders or members ineleven DFA program planning exercises,either as consultants or A.I.D. staff,based in Washington and overseas. That meansthat about half of the top twenty-three A.I.D. programs in sub-SaharanAfrica have included anthropologists on teams which have worked with mission staffsto identify the basic objectivesand, thus, the basic directions of U.S.foreign assistance in those countries.Those anthropologists have varying professionalbackgrounds and experiences and come from several sub-fields inanthropology. However, their specialqualifications derive principally from the holisticapproach which is so central to thediscipline. The upcoming work which will continueto refine and improve DFAimplementa- tion will include anthropologicalinput.

The second major way thatanthropologists can contribute to work on the DFA is through the identification ofmeaningful progress in the achievement of A.I.D. program objectives, especiallythose objectives which are indicatorsof improvements in the lives of Africanpeople, or People Level Impact. Anthropologists have an advantage inidentifying and tracking such changes because of the intensive, long-termdata bases created through their research.I want to emphasize thatthese indicators can include qualitative aswell as quantitative indicators - indeedA.I.D. needs to give more consideration to qualitative indicators.Quantitative indicators of progress in familyplanning, public health, transport sectorgrowth, and in economic output andother economic areas are becoming betterunderstood and accepted.Anthropology could substantially advance ourunderstanding of the qualitative dimensions of development progress, especially insub-Saharan Africa.At the same time, anthropologists can also very usefullycontribute to the identification and measurement and analysis ofquantitative indicators.

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Finally, anthropologistscan contribute to the interpretation ofdata necessary to judge the directions in whicheconomic and social development trends are taking African societies.In the not-too-distant future,A.I.D. must interpret and draw conclusionsfrom its hopefully rich lode ofDFA impact reporting. Anthropologists shouldlogically be in the forefront ofthose who could be called upon toanswer the "so what" questions. In therecent applied anthropological literature, this isoften referred to as making themicro-macro linkages. For example,so what if the indicator changes showa trend in lowering fertility, increasing employment,and increasing agriculturalexports - what does that mean in changes in the prospects for the people of the country?While highly general, theseare the kinds of questions A.I.D. willultimately have to explore in justifying and explainingits work in Africa to the American and the U.S. Congress. There people are now, and most likely will continueto be, opportunities for anthropologiststo help A.LD. thinkmore inclusively and, hopefully, wisely in understandingthe problems and opportunitiesin the countries where it is working in Africa.

5!i 1

Increased food in local markets

[drifters offer more fuod Increased number of Improved transport for sale traders to move food infrastructure and through market system market facilities

ceased food production Improved market .nforma- Improve policy and regu- Improve market facilities Rehabilitate and IImprove transport fleet tion latory climate for construct farm to market traders in food crops roads lf; I FIGURE 2

PROJECT LOGICAL FRAMEWORK

Narrative Indicators Menas of Verification Assumptions Goal!

Purpose: End of Project Status 01 cll64:6

Outputs:

Inputs:

1 f; 3 IG0 FIGURE 3 PROGRAM LOGICAL FRAMEWORK

NARRATIVE OTHER NECESSARY & INDICATORS SOURCE OF DATA) SUFFICIENT FACTORS RESPONSIBLE COLLECTOR GOAL COUNTRY TREND

SUB-GOAL

S IR ATEG IC ObJ ECTIVE

PERFORMANCE TARGET

SUB-TA R( ; FT PRACTICING THE ANTHROPOLOGYOF DEVELOPMENT: COMMENTS ON "ANTHROPOLOGYAND FOREIGN ASSISTANCE"

ROBERT M. NETTING

"Applied anthropologist." It hasan archaic ring and has long sincegone the way of the dodo, to be replacedby the more professional (andsomewhat more tentative and less arrogant) practicinganthropologist.But the modern moniker also denotes a healthy skepticismabout the comprehensiveness of theory in social science and theease of withdrawing the appropriate model fromour existing kit bag and mechanically "applying"it. This coincides witha declining confidence in the old interventions, thelarge-scale capital intensive infrastructural projects of the sixties, and the fixationon short-term projects with quick-fix results that Gerry Britan mentions.in fact, the new structural adjustmentand privatization rhetoric may beanti-interventionist, trying to get both national governments and international agenciesto stop some of the things theyare doing in the name of developmentdistributingsubsidized fertilizer that arrivestoo late for the planting season, keeping urbanfood prices so low that farmers can't make a buck, appropriating scarce land through therice paddies (without reimburse- ment) to make field roads where footpaths sufficed, ard dumping pedicabs in the ocean because taxisare ...lore modern.

Yet for all the talk ofentreprenei autonomy, common property institutions, and low-energy indigenoustec gy, at some fundamental level, many western-educated elites and socialicientists do not believe that (1) traditional knowledge and socialorganization provided highly effectivemeans of sustainable food production,labor mobilization, and riskreduction, and (2) these solutions can be locallyadapted to environmental fluctuations,increasing

147 f.; 148 market involvement and price changes,and population growth. Forexample, a resource economist ofsmall-scale fisheries who has comearound to the idea of limiting open access by "territorial userights in fisheries" (TURFS) still accuses anthropologists of advocating MSA,maximum sustainable anachronisms.He suspects that user groups ofvillages or associations lack thecapacity to establish effective rules, enforce them fairly,monitor the resource, and interactwith extra- local marketing and governmentalbodies. He contrasts variousnational plans, the conflict over innovationslike trawlers, and central policychanges, but he has trouble imagining the variety oflocal institutions that have evolved to meetthe problems of fishermen, and theirability to adapt to changing circumstancesin ways that are rationalbut different.

This is precisely the anthropologicalturf, what several authors in this issue call our comparativeadvantage. We have the trainingand experience to assess existing groupswhere economic decisions are madeand where corporate structures constrain andcoordinate behavior. Economists maymodel principles of abstract, generalizedhouseholds, but they very seldomcollect data on household production and consumption,how earnings from the informal economy are pooled,dowry and property inheritance, ageand gender factors in the developmental cycle, and thefarming system differences within acommunity that Peggy Barlett (1982) andGillian Hart (1986) show are predicta:Ayrelated to household access to land resources.As Boyle and Britan point out,and as Rick Wilk (1989) has recently emphasized,the household cannot be treated as an undifferentiated "black box," and thechoices of labor allocation, landacquisition, and purchases of goods, education,and medical services made there have along- term logic, often crossingthe generations, that cannot becaptured in notions of short-range individualistic maximization.Even rapid appraisal andstratified random interviews can illuminate processesof pooling, migration and remittance, marriage and household formationthat are intimately associated withthe price of yams and petrol, the size ofschool fees, and the land tenure lawsenforced by the courts.If we are to take Mason's suggestionand see secondary cities as potentially providing the marketing,transport services, and non-farme.aploy- ment that stimulate developmentrather than as depressing sink holesfor the rural poor, we must find out fromhousehold members why they decided to migrate and how they createinstitutions that make urban life notonly survivable but attractive.From household survey data andanalysis, we must take our insights on human welfare and equity tothe policy table where, as Boylemakes clear, the macroeconomists' growthdiscow so maintains its hegemony.

Because of variation between andwithin communities, we have to be practical ethnologists, comparing casesin space and historical time to exposethe actual functioning of real systems.The goals of macro policyreform, such as removing fertilizer distributionfrom the parastatal to the market orletting

1C7 149 independent traders buy cocoa instead of the marketing board,may be straightforward and widely accepted. But who has the requisitebookkeeping skills, can the clan be a credit union, is the irrigation socivAyor the alp association able to become a cooperative handling agricultural inpu .s? Scratchan anthropol- ogist and you find populist sympathies, but coherent economic analysisof how existing local institutions work and their potential for change is what givessense to our sentiments. And such analysis is conservative only in thesense that it recognizes how cultural conventions and expectations when still vibrantlyintact can give people the confidence to introduce, voluntarily, quite radical change. We must beware of our own biases in favor of persistent cultural meanings and traditional social continuity, in addition questioning thereceived wisdom of dependency theory, e.g., that womenare always relegated to domestic production and out of the cash crop sector, or that capitalist penetrationleads to a polarization of big land owners and a landless rural proletariat. The anthropo- logical edge is still that on-the-ground, garden variety research thattells us what is happening in the field and what the range of variation is.Until some other discipline decides that for certain purposes micro-level dataare preferable to large-scale, aggregate bureaucratically assembled statistics (showing,for example, that Nigeria is mired in a food crisis with amazingly few outwardsigns of malnutrition), we will be the sole suppliers of the kinds of basic informationthat, as Pat Vondal asserts, can qualify the assumptions of macro-economic theory.

For some questions such as the participation and economic contribution of women in microenterprises, the requisite baseline statisticsdon't exist. Mari Clark shows that in both AID project designs and in hostcountry small business development plans, gender issues were often overlooked until recently.Cultural relativism and political expediency may allow sexist biasto affect data gathering and slant recommendations. Anthropologistscan show that women's businesses generate employment, repay loans, and support children's education, butfemale entrepreneurs don't count unless they are counted. Thatwomen go about being rational maximizers in ways different than those ofmen is, as Philip Boyle emphasizes, a lesson many economists have yet to learn.

Some years ago, Alan Hoben (1980), from thevantage point of AID, pointed out that bureaucrats are at leastas rational as peasants, and as emphasis shifts to policy reform, attention to the organization andindividual career goals of government agencies may necessarily increase. To facilitatea devolution of control and power from government agencies to individualhouseholders, associations, and local communities means disturbing officialhierarchies rooted in colonialism or strongly entrenched economicinterests.Can we and the political scientists and economists do the institutionalanalysis that Vondal and Clark recommend in order to demonstrate bette-uses for our subsidized

16S 150 bureaucratic person power and reduce the transactioncosts of the licenses, restrictive laws, and graft that officials use torestrict growth and indirectly stimulate the informal economy? Questions of power,authority, and accountabil- ity that we have grappled with since Weber arestill awaiting answers.

A monopoly instituted by a businessman may bejust as deleterious as a public, state-level monopoly. We need todistinguish the economic inequality that occurs in every development situation as aresult of individual management, labor, and capital differences from that derived frompolitical pull and special legal advantages. This implies learning how successfultraders or farmers got that way, and why some ethnic groups or localpopulations transform themselves better than others. Vondal's key question ofNhether undeniable inequality of wealth means lack of economic mobilityand inequity of access to resources cannot be answered from theory and yetit can be investigated empirically. We can measure bothtratification and mobility to determine if inequity isindeed growing. Institution building is not a constant, and, asRobert Wade (1988) demonstrates for South India, communities at the headand tail end of a single irrigation system can have functionallydistinct corporate mechanisms for regulating and protecting scarce resources.Officials may not believe that the villagers have their own regulations to limitfirewood cutting or that urban ragpickersorganizetheirscavenginginwaysthatDavidHesscalls "quintessentially rational." The government employee athis urban desl. may at the same time own an orange grove and cassavagarden in the country, support kin being schooled in town, go weekly to the newhouse he is building on the ?arental homestead, and belong to a native sons'union in the city. A "rural- urban divide" categorization does not catch thisdiversity, as John Mason stresses, and conceptually it gets in the way of understandingwhat indeed motivates the bureaucrat/farmer in his variety of roles. How does thepublic man function in the private sector, and does his on-ping ruralexperience affect his view of policy? Governmental institutions closer to home, as well asfledgling interest groups concerned with the environmint, arevalid objects of an action-oriented anthropology. An informed grasp of the way in whichAmerican public reaction to global warming due to anthropogenicgreenhouse gases can translate into Congressional policy making was, as Katy Moran demonstrates, akey first step in making sustainabk. development a relevant conceptin foreign assistance. Where no formal organizations exist in government orin local communities to deal with emerging problems of energy efficiency andconservation, anthropolo- gists can recognize and facilitate the NGOs hereand abroad that monitor

1ro 151

processes like deforestation andpropose alternate indigenousor innovative low- energy technologies.

Are anthropologists goingto be at the forefront of planning policyreform and structural adjustmentin AID in the light ofnew legislation and an already changing mission? The otherauthors can answer that questionbetter than 1, but I don't think so. The grandemerging design of national follows a formula that institutional change seems obvious to the macro-economistsand political economists, and they already havethe clout. But they either can'tor won't tell you about the economic choices peopleare in fact making, the daily allocations of labor time, the savingand spending of cash, themaking of rules and monitoring of behavior, thatgoes on in face-to-face corporategroups from the household through the workgroup or village to the microenterpriseand the government bureau. Implementationdoes not go on in a void--ora black box. It ,,ccurs on an uneven cultural and political playing field.If policy changes and privatization presentmore options at the local level, thesedecisions from below will become more important. Therewill be a greater variety ofsocial experiments and problem solving. We thinkthat non-Western peoplehave always had functional, comprehensible socialinstitutions, and we believein their creative capacity to adapt and change. Ouranalysis of how choices, preferences,and indigenous institutionscan and are coping with thenew constraints and options is an indispensable contribution.

1 7 ) 152

REFERENCES

Barlett, Peggy F. Decision Making in a 1982 Agricultural Choice and Change: Costa Rican Community.New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Hart, Gillian Processes of Change in 1986 Power, Labor, and Livelihood: Rural Java. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Hoben, Alan in Foreign Assistance: An 1980 Agricultural Decision-Making Anthropological Analysis.In Agricultural Decision Making, Peggy Barlett, ed.New York: Academic, pp. 337-369.

Wade, Robert Conditions for Collective 1988 Village Republics: Economic Action in South India.Cambridge: Cambridge Universi- ty Press.

Wilk, Richard R. Flows Within the House- 1989 Decision Making and Resource hold: Beyond the Black Box.In The Household Econo- my: Reconsideringthe Domestic Mode ofProduction, R. R. Wilk, ed. Boulder:Westview, pp. 23-52. NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

PHILIP BOYLE carried out Ph.D. anthropological researchon the agro-pastoral economy and social structure of a Central Moroccan population. Boyle has served in a variety of social science positionsin the design, manage- ment and evaluation of development assistance projects inAsia, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and North Africa.His most recent focus has been the social and micro-economic effects ofeconomic reform. Prior to his present position as an independent consultant, Boylewas a senior social science analyst in the Office of Women in Development,Bureau for Program and Policy Coordination at the Agency forInternational Development in Washington, D.C.

GERALD M. BRITAN is a senior social scientist and chiefresearch methodologist in the Agency for International Development'sProgram and Policy Evaluation Division. Since receiving his Ph.V. in ecologicalanthropology from Columbia University in 1974, he has split hisprofessional career nearly equally between government and academia,teaching at North- western University, serving as Associate Dean of Graduate Studiesand Research at Southern Illinois University, and workingas a senior evaluation analyst at the USDA, before joining A.I.D.in 1984. Fe has conducted field research in Canada, Africa,Asia, and the United States, focusing on economic decision making, socio-culturalchange, organiza- tional behavior, evaluation methodology, and the dynamicsof bureaucra- cy. Dr. Britan has published numerous articles and reports and several book in these fields, including Hierarchy and Society:Anthropological Perspectives on Bureaucracy (co-edited withRonald Cohen) and Bureaucracy and Innovation.Most recently, he has been developing improved systems for measuring the performanceof A.I.D.'s programs as a basis for more strategic management for development results.

MARI CLARK is a long term consultantto the Office of Women in Development (WID), Agency for International Development, throughLabat-Anderson Incorporated. In the WID Office sheserves as evaluation coordinator and liaison for Eastern Europe. She holdsa Ph.D. in economic anthropology and an M.Ed. in educational media from the Universityof North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she taught in the Women's StudiesProgram and worked on the staff of the Program for InternationalTraining in Health (INTRAH). She also holds an MA in anthropologyfrom the University

153 2 154 of Pennsylvania. Her work for theWorld Bank :ncluded an assessment of surviwl strategies of the poor inKenya. Her chapter in the present volume entitled "Gender Issues inMicroenterprise" is based in part on her review of the ARIES (Assistance toResearch Institutionsfor Enterprise Support) project for the A.1.D. WIDOffice through Nathan Associates.

DAVID W. HESS performed Ph.D. anthropologicalresearch in Bolivia where he examined decision making used by highlandIndians in relocating to planned settlements in the lowland forest area. Hesshas been a foreign service officer in the Agency for InternationalDevelopment for eleven years, having served in Cote D'Ivoire, Peru, Bolivia, Washington, D.C., and is presently serving in Guinea.His work for the Agency has included design, evaluation, and management forprojects in regional development, decentralization, and institutionaldevelopment. Prior to his present position as USA1D Mission senior programofficer in Conakry, Hess was Deputy Chief of the programevaluation office in the Washing- ton-based Africa Bureau.

JOHN I'. MASON is a senior social scientistin the Evaluation Office of the Agency for International Development,Washington, D.C. He has worked for two decades in international development,including a decade overseas in Arab,African, and Caribbean countries.Mason, who did Ph.D. research on socioeconomicchange in a Saharan desert oasis community in Libya, has taught anthropology atthe University of Libya (1968-1970),Rensselaer PolytechnicInstitute(1971-1973),andthe American University in Cairo (1973-1977). Heworked for the United Nations in Libya (1977-1979) as a social planner on aphysical planning project and for the Cooperative HousingFoundation as a development anthropologist and assistant vice president(1979-1985).Mason is a former director of the AID DevelopmentStudies Program in Washington. He has field experience in project feasibilitystudies; design, management, and evaluation in urban development andplanning; village planning; and water and sanitation.Mason is a past president of the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists.

KATY MORAN is currently programanalyst for the Assistant Secretary of External Affairs at the Smithsonian Institution.The article describes an initiative pursued while she was legislative assistantfor Representative John Porter (R-IL). An applied anthropologistspecializing in resource management, Katy was responsiblefor environmental issues, particularly those affected by US foreign assistance,while working as a congressional staffer.Rep. Porter is a member of the U.S. Houseof Representatives

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subcommittee on Foreign Operationsof the AppropriationsCommittee which funds US foreign aidprograms. ROBERT McC. NETTING', anthropological research in culturalecology and economics has beon concernedwith the interaction ofenvironment, technology, and sodal organizationin societies of intensive ists. agricultural- Major field work has includedstudies of the NigerianKofyar beginning in 1960 and of thealpine Swiss village of Toerbel.A recently completed book manuscript on smallholder agriculture andhouseholds examines similar questions ofpopulation density, intensivecultivation techniques, household labor andmanagement, sustainability, landtenure, and inequality ina wide set of ethnographiccases including that of China.His teachingover nine years at Penn and nineteen Arizona has included years at courses in ecological anthropology,African ethnology, development, andthe history and theory ofcultural anthro- pology. For a NationalAcademy of Sciences committeeon the human dimensions of global change,he surveyed recent workon Amazon deforestation. He has beennominated as president ofthe International Association for the Study ofCommon Property witha term beginning in Sept. 1991.

PATRICIA J. VONDAL isa senior social science analystat A.l.D.'s Center for Deve!opment Information andEvaluation. She has conducted in Indonesia, and through A.I.D. research has also worked in ,Kenya, Jordan, Ecuador, Guatemala,Honduras and Bolivia. Her ve!ume is based chapter in this on policy research conducted forA.I.D.'s Bureau for Africa and Bureau for Scienceand Technology. Vondalcurrently advises A.I.D. Missions in LatinAmerica on data collectionneeds and methodolo- gies for program impactmonitoring and evaluation.

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