Katharine
Coit
Université
de Rouen
“The rule of law does not do away
with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that
inequality with the authority of law. It
allocates wealth and poverty…in such complicated and indirect ways as to leave
the victim bewildered” Howard Zinn
Reflection on the access of the poor to the decision making
process can be advanced from three
different angles; the barriers the poor
face, the different ways in which they
have succeeded in spite of these barriers and the role of the administration
and the political leaders.
The poor face many barriers when trying to have an
impact on decision making in cities; it is a question of the relations of power
in societies. To be far from the centre
of decisions, to lack the resources necessary to influence decisions is nearly a definition of poverty. Most often
the local governments do not make any realistic effort to encourage the poor to
gain access to power. Equality before the law is not guaranteed. Most societies
include forms of discrimination against the poor, the marginalized, those excluded for reasons of race, religion,
ethnic group, caste, or socio-cultural status. This discrimination keeps the
poor from developing a power base. Two of the eight aspects of poverty
developed by David Satterthwaite and the
IIED, are “Inadequate protection
of poorer groups rights through operation of the law” and “Poorer
groups voicelessness and powerlessness within political systems and
bureaucratic structures”. (Satterthwaite. 2004 )[i]
There are a multitude of ways in which the powerful dominate the poor and their spokesmen, appeasing them,
manipulating them or ignoring them completely.
The poor by definition are those who lack not only financial resources
but the status that gives them access to the decision making process, to the protection of the law and to the techniques of communication that would make them credible and allow them to
deal on an equal footing with the
decision makers. Access to decision
making requires a certain amount of political clout and credibility which is exactly what they lack . To wield political clout involves both having
contacts with the powerful and having a certain type of knowledge: how the
political system works, who makes the
decisions and where they are made. Not
only do the poor lack these, but it is also very often the case that those with
the power are very reluctant to give up what decision making power they have to anyone, and especially to the
poor. At best the decision makers
believe that they know what is best for the poor and do not give up their
prerogatives because they feel they are
doing the right thing and at worst they are using their power over
decision making to enrich themselves or to obtain more power over
others . In any case
as some observers put it, “ Policy
makers are not used to involving communities in their
processes and communities are not practiced in working with policy makers.”
Gloekner, Mkanga amd Ndezi, 2004.
When the poor do manage to organize
large numbers to create a political base and
they are usually considered a threat and either crushed or manipulated
so that their action does not upset the status quo. The laws of the country are
used against them not to protect them. Thus it is hardly surprising that the poor have little or no access to decision
making.
When it comes to urban space and
housing, the stakes are exceptionally high.
For city authorities, developers and their planners control over urban
space and housing is an important element of their power and a major source of enrichment. It is
often the case that politicians do not believe it is in their interest to help
the poor or that they have any obligation to the poor. A typical reaction is
that of the prime minister of Dominica, a small island in the Caribbean, who
told me it was not the role of the government to help house the poor. But her government was, in fact, helping the
not so poor, its clients, to be housed.
My experience in Ho-Chi-Minh City
also indicates that city authorities are often more interested in developing
commercial areas and expensive housing
than in helping the poor. When approached concerning a project aimed at
upgrading a slum area to improve the lives of the poor population, the local
officials came up with a counter proposal
which consisted in simply
removing the low income population in order to build a large road for
commercial development. Then two years
later, once the community oriented upgrading project was completed and the facilitators had left, the local people’s
committee immediately shut down the evening school program for children unable
to go to the regular school and took control of the micro credit program giving
the community no voice in these matters.
A
well documented example of how power hierarchies dominate decision making
concerning housing on a larger scale can be found in a work on a slum in Madras
“Policy, Politics and the Urban Poor”, by Joop W. de Wit 1996 . This book
documents the lack of access of poor people to decision making concerning the
relocation of their slum. It shows how
the political party heads take over the role of leadership and create division
among the slum dwellers , how they use the poor as vote banks, buying the votes
very cheaply, how they act as brokers
between the state agencies and the poor but obtain little for them and keep
them in a state of dependency. This
exemplifies one of the major barriers to access of the poor to decision
making. Lacking their own leaders who
feel competent to communicate with authorities, they are represented by others
who do not necessarily share the same goals.
Very often slums and shanty towns
are considered to be cancers in the flesh of the city that must be gotten rid
of; the inhabitants of these slums are
thought to be the cause of this malignancy and the most efficient treatment
cutting them out by strong armed evictions.
Equality before the law is not
guaranteed for the poor. Even where the laws are pro-poor and against eviction
it happens that courts allow
evictions. For this reason many housing
activists are convinced that the legal system cannot help them. At a brainstorming session on evictions held
at the IIED office in October 2002 for a gathering of senior community leaders, housing
specialists, NGOs, and government officials
the following comments where made. (ACHR, p.23)
·
“We have a formal written policy of
non-eviction in Nairobi, but there are
clearly evictions going on – very big ones.
So the work of preventing eviction and creating secure housing for
people in our cities is not about written law; its constantly about changing
the p
·
ower politics. And that comes from the practices and the
customs in development on the ground and the rules that we make our
selves.” Jane Weru; Pamoja Trust, Kenya.
·
“In many of our cities eviction
problems come from problems of power – from the huge differences in power
between the state and the people on the
ground. When we emphasize laws in
solving these problems, we are
emphasizing the same group of people who hold power. The power of the poor as scattered families
or scattered communities is very weak.
But the power of broadly linked community groups is strong enough that
they have a stronger position in the negotiation – as a group. When people link together this way – and
especially when they link through concrete development activities- it is a way
of adjusting that power. And this is
what makes change.” Somsook Boonyabancha; CODI, Thailand.
·
“The legal process can be very
powerful at the intellectual and conceptual level, but a lot of us who are
working on the ground have realized that ultimately it does very little for the
lives of the people that we are having all this discussion for. At the end of the day those poor people’s
houses are still being demolished, their belongings still being confiscated,
their jobs still being lost, their lives still being turned upside down…. The real
crisis in this situation is that even if all this hot air leads to some policy
or other, it never gets enacted. I think
that where we have failed in the last 25 years … is that there isn’t a strong
parallel ground swell which is being
empowered to challenge this
process and say, ‘The city belongs to us as much as it belongs to you’.” Sheela Patel, SPARK, India.
·
“I think that those customs and practices which lead to
alternatives to evictions change only when the power relationships in the
cities change. As long as those power relationships are unequal, those
customs and practices will not change.
Legal and institutional arrangements are important but its also
important to find ways to support and promote
the building of networks of community organizations who play a role
around proactive strategies to avoid evictions and by creating a much stronger
constituency of people’s organizations at the global level who are able to
articulate their own strategies for dealing with forced evictions. And to create opportunities for those groups
to share their knowledge and experience together.” Joel Bolnick, People’s Dialogue, South Africa.
These four voices from strong
movements in the south all concur on two points: Legal rights and access to the courts is not
often effective. On the other hand building up a power base is the most
important way to have poor peoples voices heard. “Changing power politics”,
“strong broadly linked community groups linked through concrete development
activities”, “a strong parallel grass roots ground swell” “strong
constituencies of people’s organizations” these expressions refer to empowering
the poor communities.
Another type of barrier can be
caused by the attitude “we know better”
. Whether by members of government or
international or local NGOs, doing things for people rather than with them
prevents the poor from expressing their own views. There is a good example of
this sort of attitude in a government program in Jamaica . A project called
PRIDE, which sought to help low income squatters acquire land for housing, was
planned with the intention of having the program be directed by the communities
themselves. The households had to save
money to contribute to a community infrastructure fund which the community
organisation was then to run. This project had a grant for $270,000 from the
IDB . An official account based on field
research and the opinions of the
beneficiaries reports that Operation Pride has deviated from its stated
policy of mobilizing communities to make the decisions on the infrastructure
upgrading. The staff of PRIDE made the
decisions in the place of the community and excluded them from the selection of
professionals who prepare the plans and the contractors who implement them and
in many other of the important decisions concerning the upgrading process. This
attitude is an example of bureaucratic paternalism when government agents “alone know best when designing and
delivering policies and services”. As a result “most PRIDE community organisations suffered two main setbacks that
prevented them from becoming effective organisations capable of empowering
their members. Not only have they been
dominated by PRIDE officials, which has tended to undermine a sense of project ownership by community –organisation
members, but these organisations have also generally lacked the necessary
professional guidance to enhance leadership skills and promote a balance of
power in favour of community organiation members. (Tindigarukayo 2004, p207).
It is not always outsiders that
prevent communities from getting their voice to be heard. It can also be indigenous people who become
leaders and who learn how to get on with officialdom, to get grants and run
offices and who soon loose contact with their base. An article on the transformation of an NGO in
Jakarta describes just this sort of upward mobility of male community leaders
and the change it brought to the NGO .
“We had
started as a small grass roots project driven by the needs and capacities of
local women. We became a complex,
top-down, technically oriented, capital intensive bureaucracy guided by
government and big international donor agencies.”
“We moved from a collective leadership strongly influenced by women and
social workers to an autocratic male leadership dominated by technically
oriented men. From a focus on grassroots
communication and networking we had
moved to an emphasis on formal office
meetings, increasingly out of touch with what was happening on the ground.”
(Lea Jellinek, 2003,p. 179)
However, in spite of the barriers it
does happen that the poor succeed in getting access to decision making, or are
able to influence decisions in urban planning. There are a variety of
circumstances in which the poor have overcome these handicaps, have developed political clout and have had an impact. Some have been gained by conflict, others
by some sort of co-operation with the
authorities but all have necessitated the determined organisation of large
numbers. There are many different approaches to empowering the poor depending
on the socio-cultural background.
One method used in a context in
which the poor have never been listened to has been to have the community
members be the ones who collect the data and analyse the situation. An example this can be seen in the study of
Water Aid in Dar es Salaam, a this city
which has a continuing water and sanitation crisis; one aspect of the study was
a programme of community mapping in which the local people were helped to map
out their own community. This is a
technique that has been successfully
applied in Asia and Africa for development planning and for community
mobilising and empowerment. It is not
only a useful tool for those providing infrastructure but it is a great step towards empowerment
and giving poor people access to the decision making process.. “This
participatory process helps to uncover issues particular to a given settlement
that residents are struggling to develop.
By collecting information of their settlement, community members come to
understand their situation better and can conceptualise a process of
change within it..” Other than
providing data the community mapping helped to: “To build the capacity of local organisations to influence
decision-making processes”. and “to
use the data collected to establish
links between the micro level and the macro level. (Glockner, Mkanga & Ndezi, 2004 P 187-188).
The history of the
Giraudel-Eggleston Reconstruction
Committee in the Commonwealth of Dominica shows that not only poor people can
get things done, but when they do - in this case rebuild housing - they can do a better job than the
authorities. Their action occurred after their villages had been severely
damaged by a hurricane. It took a few
local people who had the necessary contacts and some sensible ideas for this
project to succeed. The reconstruction of houses blown down by a cyclone was
organised and managed by local poor people whose houses had been destroyed or
damaged. The local priest was instrumental in finding an NGO to make a grant
that was used as a revolving fund to buy the building material. The local committee drew up the plans for the
reconstruction of the houses with the owners. Nearly all the construction was
done by collective self-help under the direction of a few of the skilled
builders in the community who volunteered some time and got some pay. The role of the government was to offer free
transport of the building materials. This project was one of the very few on
that island that succeeded in helping the extremely low income families. As the
local people initiated the project and took responsibility for it, they were
able to judge how much they could afford.
They were also able to organise the community participation successfully. In comparison to what the government was
doing they were way ahead. They were able to reconstruct one third of
the homes in the area whereas the government
was barely able to provide 200 new houses for the whole island of 80,000,000. (Coit, 1988). Furthermore, their
houses were much cheaper than those built by the government. These poor villagers were able to carry off
their action as they had the support of a few local people of a certain status
who had credibility in the eyes of the government. They were well organised and pulled together
on the project and were able to obtain financial support from an outside source
.
One of the best known examples of poor people
influencing decision making is that of the Mahila Milan, the pavement dwellers
of Mumbai who have been at the root of an important movement, (D’Cruz pp. 10-12
). It all began with the actions of some women pavement dwellers of the streets
of Mumbai. When confronted with a court order to demolish their homes, rather
than to prepare for confrontation, which is the usual reaction, this group of
women chose to look for a solution that would not arouse the hostility of the
municipality. With the help of SPARC ,
(an NGO created in 1984 by professionals
social workers concerned with urban poverty in Mumbai,) they
first conducted a survey of pavement slum dwellers in the E ward which
was published in a document called We The
Invisible that caught the attention of the authorities. In this report they proposed that the government of
Maharashtra and the Central government participate with them in finding a solution.
They formed the association called Mahila Milan (women together) at this time
and it rapidly gathered in numbers and
influence. The next steps were to inventory all the vacant land, to talk
to banks to find out why they couldn’t get loans to make savings of their own
and to draw up designs for cheap housing. The municipality began to listen to
them. The idea was that:
· “ The state provide land free or at subsidised costs,
· the Municipal Corporation provide
off site infrastructure like it does to all its citizens,
· communities design (build)and manage their settlements
spearheaded by the women, who having built their capacity to manage savings,
create an information base and supervise construction.” (D’Cruz, 2002 p.2)
This strategy of compromise by the
community was supported by the NGO, SPARC, that did not speak for the community but helped them
create a dialogue and to get results.
One result has been that in 1995
the government of Maharashtra enacted the “Slum Rehabilitation Act” .
The core group of women of Mahila Milan obtained a piece of land to build on ,
and there is now a policy for the
relocation of the 20,000 pavement dwellers households covered by the census of
Mahila Milani. This co-operation came
about because of the way the slum
dwellers were able to focus on common ground with the city ; they were able to get a favourable public opinion in other parts of
the city, they were able to show the city that the urban poor had capabilities
and skills useful to the city. In
1995 they joined with a third
organisation, the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and the 3 groups formed a network called the Alliance. This helped them form a critical mass able to
create momentum. They created other
Mahila Milan all over the city with slum
and pavement dwellers and then sent teams to other cities to create more Mahila Milan . The major innovative elements of the
practices of Mahila Milan and the Alliance which have allowed them to develop
the political clout necessary to be able to
dialogue with the authorities are :
·
their
willingness to negotiate with whoever is in power,
· their commitment to methods of organisation and mobilisation that build on
the knowledge and the capacity of the poor,
(“the poor are the best drivers of shared solutions”);
· the importance of the savings of the poor
themselves. This is fundamental not only for the revenues which give them their
own collateral but in that the women must show a certain discipline and pull
together in a savings group . (D’Cruz, 2002 pp10-12).
As well as promoting individual
savings and self-help construction of
housing they support the building and managing of urban services and
environmental upgrading by the local communities . For instance in many neighbourhoods of Mumbai
and other cities, the Alliance has been able to obtain the funding and the
support from the municipalities for the community construction and management
of badly needed public toilets. The
Alliance gains credibility and prestige
as these commodities, when managed locally, are usually much more efficient.
News of
the actions and tactics of Mahala Milan and the Alliance have been
communicated to other countries and continents via the network of federations of slum or shanty dwellers
(SDI)of which The Alliance was one of the founding members. One of their more successful ways of communicating their
strategies and tactics and training communities in these methods has been via grass roots exchanges of SDI
members. Contact between grass roots groups of slum or shack dwellers has proved to be a very
effective way of mobilising communities
that have not previously been active.
The Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation, for instance is the result of
a visit made there by the South Africans People’s Federation. After regular contacts between these groups
for more groups were formed in Zimbabwe. At first most of the local governments
in Zimbabwe had not listened to these groups.
However, the international
exchanges as well as the funds that were saved in the groups lent them
legitimacy and caused the authorities to change their attitude . The savings
schemes had 20,000 members by 2002 (Chitekwe and Mitlin pp 85 – 102..) Whereas until 2001 it was very difficult for
the poor to obtain local access to land, recently, under pressure from the
Homeless Peoples Federation, city councillors have begun to re-examine their
polities for the urban poor. Nine local
authorities have committed themselves to releasing municipal land for the poor
and seven have released plots. SDI is
important not only for the promotion of grass roots exchanges but also for the
international support it gives to local actions adding credibility to the
actions and thus enhancing the “ rapport de force”
If
these different poor communities have had access to decision making it is
because they have been able to create a more equal relation of power between
grass roots groups and the administration.
Their power is based on their having been able to develop:
·
a “critical mass” , that is large numbers
·
co-operation
and common goals among the community groups (that is “pulling together” )
·
the support of public opinion, sometimes international
public opinion
·
talented indigenous leaders who remain faithful to
their communities.
·
professionals or activists willing to help the
communities to have a voice rather than speaking for them.
·
their ability to build up individual and community
savings
·
their capacity to provide useful data such as an
enumeration of slum dweller or community mapping.
With
these attributes the poor have a better chance that elected officials
and the government agents will listen to them.
It
happens, but less frequently, that programmes within the framework of local
governments aimed at improving infrastructure and services for the poor do
provide access for the poor to decision making. An evaluation (or to use the
new vocabulary “introspection” ) of the Andhra
Pradesh Urban Services for the Poor in India indicates that poor women have
been given more of a voice through a participatory process in which they were
involved in “microplanning” for the infrastructure (Dove, pp. 95 – 106). Their
relationship with other stake holders has begun to change. One comment from a
political representative was “In the old
system, everything went according to the wishes of the councillor. In (this process) , apart from my opinion,
the wishes of the people have to be taken into account”. (Dove, p.105)
In
these examples, the “rapport de force” we have discussed has been between the
poor people’s organisations and the public officials with little mention of the
major decision makers, the private
sector, the landowners, developers and bankers. The owners of urban land and
real estate and the suppliers of urban services and finance have the greatest
control over urban space. Much of the decision making power is in their
hands. However, it is not usual for the
poor to deal directly with them; the
government is needed to mediate between the In these examples, the “rapport de
force” we have discussed has been between the poor people’s organisations and
the public officials with little mention of the major decision makers, the private sector, the landowners, developers
and bankers. The owners of urban land poor and these decision makers. Government has thus a key role to play
enabling the poor if they are to have access to decision making; the difficulty
is in forcing it to play this role. As
we have seen, legislation protecting the
poor is of little or no use if it is not enforced. For poor peoples’ organisations,
developing political clout is the best
way to get governments to enforce pro-poor programmes and actions. The minimum one should be able to expect of
governments is to provide for the poor the same rights as for other people and
to prevent anti-poor private sector actions such as evictions without decent
appropriate relocation. At best governments can be a major factor in supporting
poor community groups by providing land, or tenure on land, low cost services,
infrastructure and loan. Their role should be an enabling one, allowing
access decision making not one of doing things for the poor. To have access to decision making the poor
need their rights to be defended, credibility and encouragement.
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D’Cruz, Celine,
April, 2002, “Demolition to Dialogue” paper
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