By Keith Miller
Local government reform must be implemented. Such reforms are to ensure that the local government system is driven by a community initiative and orientation. Under this new local government, the citizen is to be the prime motivating force in making choices about development and management of local government affairs. With this model of a community/citizen driven system of local government, local government provides the framework, and acts as a facilitator in ensuring development. But can the existing local government system meet this challenge? The answer, I think, is no, and consequently we must turn to the issue of capacity-building. Capacity-building becomes necessary if we are to develop a coherent framework to facilitate an increase in the ability of citizens, individually and collectively in their communities and their councils to identify their needs and opportunities and to make choices between competing options and to take action to meet those needs. Put differently, when we speak of a process to enable bottom-up planning or dynamic planning, whereby persons at the bottom take the initiative, we are talking about building capacity.
Lack of capacity is one of the critical constraints to development in most developing countries. Such a lack of capacity is evident throughout the Caribbean, and could be easily illustrated with regard to the critical issues of finance and human resources. Thus, our lack of capacity ensures our inability to utilize available resources. Hence while we complain about the lack of capital investment, we can appreciate that there exists a substantial amount of investment capital available, but which cannot be utilized, because the system cannot absorb it. The spin off of this is that the capital projects are delayed or unfinished because of this lack of capacity, ensuring that opportunities often go abegging. Consequently, the potential and proposed community development projects are often ignored or indefinitely postponed.
Similarly, with regard to human resources, our societies are characterized by massive amounts of untapped and under-utilized talents, creativity, and the non-incorporation of our informal leaders. Our inability to tap into these resources can be reflective of our lack of capacity. But herein lies a paradox. On the one hand we seem to be lacking capacity, on the other we are unable to tap these resources. Obviously something systematic is wrong. Centrists who subscribe to the theory of more centralization, blame the situation on the management personnel who give directions and enable the masses to perform. They use failures of the system to prescribe greater centralisation. The underlying assumption of these centrists is that people in the lower echelons of their organisation or the ordinary citizens in the communities are lazy, incompetent, irresponsible and generally incapable of problem-solving, and they need to be supervised and directed in order to accomplish anything. Therefore the impetus to centralize is offered as the only way we can get things done.
