Development Administration and Constituency Organization

Abstract

T he main traditions of American administrative writing assume that the state has the capacity to extend services to the mass of its citizens on an individual basis through its bureaucratic structures. Consequently, they focus on the direct of public services by administrative agencies to clients or beneficiaries-the health specialist to the patient, the extension agent to the farmer. This assumption, however overlooks a large class of governmentsponsored activities, especially in developing countries, which have the following features: 1) mass clienteles of low-income, low-status persons; 2) availability to government of very limited financial and administrative resources, precluding the extension of services to intended beneficiaries on a one-to-one basis; 3) serious information or confidence gaps between government and intended beneficiaries, complicating the problem of effective interaction, especially through bureaucratic channels; 4) the expectation of responsive behavior by clients, which may be induced but cannot be coerced by public authority, such as improved cultivation practices or the adoption of birth control methods. Though members of the public require individualized attention, governments may lack the capacity to reach them through normal bureaucratic channels. While some of these conditions prevail in industrialized countries, e.g., the urban ghettos in the United States, they are the norm in most of the less developed countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Reaching the poor majority is becoming a concern of governments in many of these countries. Government elites increasingly recognize that development efforts of the past two decades, many of which have produced impressive rates of aggregate economic growth, have yielded little or no benefit to the majority of their citizens, especially those in rural areas, and that this failure is pregnant both with human misery and political danger. This awareness has been reinforced by the new directions of such development assistance agencies as the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development.' The latter, under strong congressional pressure, has reoriented its activities to programs that directly benefit the poor, especially the rural poor. The poor tend to be defined as small scale owner-cultivators or tenants rather than landless workers who are the * Data from a research program carried out at Cornell University demonstrate that in Asian countries where small farmers are grouped into locally accountable membership organizations, rural development as measured by composite indicators of productivity, welfare, and income distribution proceeded at a much more rapid rate than in countries where small farmers are not effectively organized. Constituency organizations permit small farmers to interact more productively with service-providing bureaucracies of government, to exercise influence over the behavior of locally based administrative personnel, to assert claims on government, and to provide mutual assistance. Effective and sustained constituency organization among the poor is difficult to achieve, however, and usually requires government sponsorship and support which will not be forthcoming unless government elites are interested in expanding their support base and are prepared to deal with a mobilized peasantry. On the basis of limited available evidence from the U.S., we hypothesize that non-routine public services cannot be effectively provided to socially and economically marginal publics unless these publics are organized. In the design and implementation of service delivery programs targeted to the poor, constituency organization must be considered an integral component of the administrative infra-structure in industrialized as well as in developing countries.