Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
TUESDAY 20 OCTOBER 2009
DR NAOMI
HOSSAIN AND
PROFESSOR DAVID
HULME
Q1 Chairman: Good morning. Thank
you very much for coming in to help us with this first evidence
session on our inquiry into Bangladesh, which we are heading off
to next week. I wonder, for the record, if you could introduce
yourselves.
Dr Hossain:
Good morning, I am Naomi Hossain; I work at the Institute of Development
Studies at the University of Sussex. Previously I was working
with the Research and Evaluation Division at BRAC in Dhaka as
well as doing work for DFID and other donor agencies in Bangladesh
on a freelance basis.
Professor Hulme: I am David Hulme,
Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University
of Manchester.
Q2 Chairman: We have a series of
questions for Dr Hossain and a series of questions for Professor
Hulme, but it does not stop you coming in if you think you have
something to add—do not feel you are left out. Perhaps if
I could start with you, Dr Hossain. Obviously, we have had democratic
elections in Bangladesh in the past year, but you have given quite
a lot of comments on the governance in Bangladesh. Would you bring
us up to date as to where you think the country is following the
elections and what are the main challenges that it is facing,
and perhaps help us with the kind of thing we should be looking
out for?
Dr Hossain: Sure. I am not sure
how much background you have on the government situation in Bangladesh.
Would it help if I give you a couple of minutes?
Q3 Chairman: Yes, it would.
Dr Hossain: Up until 2006 we were
experiencing a 15-year period of multi-party democratic rule in
Bangladesh, as you are probably aware. It was not a very liberal
mode of democratic rule—there were lots of problems; there
was a part-partisan penetration of state institutions and institutions
of accountability, and the rule of law was tricky. So there were
lots of problems with the kind of democracy that we had, and we
had 15 years of it. During these 15 years the main parties alternated
in power; so it was not that one party was in power the whole
time. We had five years of the BNP followed by five years of the
Awami League, followed by five years of the BNP. During that time
an institution called the Caretaker Government was established—that
was in 1996. That was after a somewhat botched attempt to allegedly
rig the election in 1996 by the then incoming incumbent. The Caretaker
Government is an innovation that uses the senior judiciary for
a three-month position to oversee the transition to government,
on the assumption that otherwise this will not happen smoothly
in a free and fair way. This was constitutionally established
in 1996. So that oversaw the 2001 election which had a major change
in government, again. In 2006 it became clear that the incumbent
government then was likely to want to stay in power and to be
attempting to (allegedly) rig the Caretaker Government so that
they would oversee an election which they were likely to win.
Ultimately, through a long process which nobody really knows the
details of, at the end of 2006 a military-supported Caretaker
Government was installed but then stayed for two years in power,
and attempted a series of governance institutional reforms. This
was a non-party government with, I believe, quite a lot of donor
support. The UN, at least, is widely believed to have been in
support of this government. So these two years were a period of
attempts to reform the governance and the political situation—party
politics, internal party democracy—efforts to separate the
judiciary from the executive. At the end of the two years, there
was an election (so this was in December—the election we
are talking about) and the Awami League then came to power with
a good strong majority. Since then—so it has been about
nine or ten months they have been in power—no formal assessment,
no kind of regular data collection that I know of has taken place
about what has been going on in governance, so far, so I cannot
give you a very full and balanced analysis of what has happened
so far. However, I have been back twice since then, so I have
spent about six weeks in Bangladesh since this government's tenure,
and talking to some of the analysts I know, people who have been
involved with some of the governance assessment work that goes
on regularly in Bangladesh, a couple of things are noted: one
is that it does seem to be business as usual, so politics does
appear to have returned to business as usual after this two-year
period of attempting to clean up governance and politics; so it
is not clear to what extent that has been very effective. It is
very clear that the rule of law has deteriorated quite rapidly
in the last nine or ten months, and some of the efforts at governance
reform do seem to have been stalled or, in some cases, reversed.
So this is the situation as people who are on the ground have
been telling me.
Chairman: That leads directly to a question
that John Battle is going to ask.
Q4 John Battle: In Bangladesh, as
part of the government's reforms that DFID here have been involved
with I think they put together a paper called Country Governance
Analysis, and I just want to know what you think DFID could
do to improve the accountability of state institutions. There
is an attempt to get projects government support but that implies
that we get good governance. How effective could DFID be and what
should it be doing? What specific institutional reforms do you
think donors should be pushing for? Should it be the rule of law;
insisting that the judiciary operate properly, or policing? What
are the things that DFID should be engaged in and, perhaps, are
not?
Dr Hossain: I think, before we
get to the specific institutional reforms, there are a couple
of things that you may be interested to explore a bit more closely
with respect to DFID's work in Bangladesh. In particular, the
best rule of thumb, before you go to do anything on governance
intervention, or development intervention, is to do no harm. I
am not saying DFID did do harm in this case but I think it is
worth exploring the extent to which donor support for the Caretaker
Government—from the military ranks—non-democratic
Caretaker Government over the two-year period, did, in fact, lead
to pro-poor outcomes and good governance outcomes. I think that
remains to be seen. Sometimes donors do intervene without necessarily
understanding the political history, and so on, and I think that
is very dangerous. That would be a general point about when to
intervene and when to find out, really, how you should be responding.
I am not saying there was an easy answer at that time; there was
not an easy answer, at that time.
Q5 John Battle: Can I press you to
say: would that view—that people are not being helpful about
governance—be the view of the government, or the rulers,
or would it be the view of the people? So that, if you like, the
donors are seen to be in bed with the governing set and against
the people. Would they be seen as on the side of the people and
popular with the government?
Dr Hossain: I am an academic so
I cannot say it is going to be that clear-cut, obviously. I do
not really know the answer to that. I think a question it would
be interesting and important to explore is the extent to which
DFID's support (I think DFID gave the appearance of being supportive,
anyway, of the Caretaker Government during its two years) contributed
to a weakening of the democratic process, and so on, or not. Perhaps
it was very supportive. I do not know the answer; we do not know.
Not much detail is known of what went on behind the scenes at
that time; we are fairly certain the UN was supportive of this
military-backed Caretaker Government, and with good intentions.
Q6 Mr Sharma: What is the role of
the opposition at present?
Dr Hossain: They are very weak
and they are very small in numbers; they are very fragmented—the
main opposition party, the BNP. A lot of them were in jail and
are, again, in jail. The former Prime Minister, Khaleda Zia, is
still the leader of the party but they are in quite a lot of disarray.
The same could be said to be true of the ruling party, though;
they are quite fragmented, at present.
Q7 Mr Sharma: Are they working in
the Parliament or the Assembly?
Dr Hossain: Yes. They are very
small in numbers this time, so it is not clear to what extent
they can have much impact.
Q8 Andrew Stunell: You have obviously
got some reservations about whether DFID did it right or not,
and in your report you said some quite stringent things about
them: "Even committed professional staff" (in DFID this
is) "lacked adequate time to engage with the evidence, travel
beyond the capital city, or to develop the relationships necessary
for a rounded and fully-informed perspective ... " That is,
in terms of reports that we get, quite strongly put. Would you
like to, perhaps, elaborate that a little bit and say what you
think we might be looking for and what assessment we might make?
Dr Hossain: Actually, for some
other purpose I was looking at the 2005 internal DFID evaluation,
and there they said very similar things; that it was increasingly
difficult for Dhaka-based DFID staff to find out what is going
on and to spend time on the ground working out what is going on
with poor people. There is a strong emphasis on the sort of upstream
policy work, which has continued. I would say, primarily, you
have very few numbers of, especially, UK-based staff in the Dhaka
office, and that those numbers seem to be dealing with ever larger
sums of money. I was living in Bangladesh between 2003 and 2008
and I did interact with quite a lot of different staff professionally
and, also, to some extent, socially in that time. My sense was
that it was increasingly difficult for them to get a good grasp
on what was going on—they just did not have the time. They
had all these large sums of money to handle. Not having the people
was a real problem for them, and DFID did have, earlier on, in
the early-2000s, a very positive reputation in Bangladesh among
the other donors and among the NGOs with whom they work of really
knowing their territory and really knowing their subject—knowing
what is going on on the ground. That reputation has, I think,
declined somewhat.
Professor Hulme: If I can just
answer that, I agree with Naomi there; there is a process that
has been put in place. DFID staff are being reduced, its spend
is being increased, so the spend per staff creates pressure, and
governance projects are extremely messy, extremely time-intensive
and you do not spend very much money on them. So the way that
DFID is being steered overall, as an institution, makes it quite
difficult to have staff who know what is happening in the field.
One of the things I would encourage you to look at is the turnover
rate of DFID staff. My perception is it has gone very high over
the last three or four years; when I called into the office I
always knew several people, I find nowadays it is a lot of new
people. Some stuff you can be briefed on but the governance stuff,
in particular, you need someone in the field.
Q9 John Battle: As well as, in a
sense, the autopsy of where we are up to now, we are going to
be there soon and I would be interested to know what focus DFID
should have now on institutional reform, given that we have to
ask for the resources and the funds to do it properly. What would
be your priorities now, with the new government, in terms of institutional
reform?
Dr Hossain: I think a lot of work
DFID does is on the button, in general. In terms of the sectors
they have selected, the public financial management (which is
not an area I know a great deal about), that has been a good area
and it has had some positive achievements. I think I said in my
note to you that I thought human security was an area that desperately
needed attention, and I know DFID have been involved with the
UNDP police reform programme. Let me just talk to you a little
bit about the focus and the kind of approach to that that I think
is interesting. DFID's approach to governance is, typically, and
for very good reasons, always from the perspective of: "Well,
we have these formal institutions of accountability, we have these
formal institutions of service delivery, and let's work with those
and see how they work." One of the points I tried to make
in that note is that when you look at governance you have to take
into account that it is an extremely poor country, and there are
two reasons why this relationship between governance and poverty
are really important. One is—which I think it is always
important (I think it really should be the litmus test of good
governance in Bangladesh)—how are the poor being affected
by governance reforms? The second thing is, actually, you need
to think about how governance is affected by poverty. The fact
is we are talking about people who are very poor; typically, still
40%, I think, illiterate. People find it very hard to engage with
formal procedures of accountability, and so on. So to think of
starting your governance reforms at the level of "Well, let's
sort out the police" is not necessarily the correct approach.
You could approach it very differently, by how are ordinary people
already coping? What are poor people already doing to ensure their
own human security? I think this would produce an entirely different
menu of options for institutional reforms.
Chairman: Just before bringing in Mark,
you have both identified the staffing pressures, which is an issue
that concerns us, not just for this report but in doing any report.
If either of you feel able to give us a slightly more substantial
note about the practical implications of those staff shortages
in Bangladesh, I think we would appreciate it. If you could give
us a fuller note on that, practically about what the effects are,
I think we would find it helpful.
Q10 Mr Lancaster: Perhaps we can
build on that comment, where, effectively, you are saying that
some of the formal accountability processes are quite weak—a
weak opposition, for example. However, you also make the point
in your note that some of the informal processes are very effective.
So could you, perhaps, give us some examples of those informal
processes and why they are being so successful?
Dr Hossain: I think the point
I was trying to make was not so much that informal accountability
pressures are effective but that they are what happens, because
formal accountability mechanisms more or less fail. Most of my
experience with this is in the area of public service delivery;
like David, I work primarily in the kind of poverty governance
interface, so I am interested in how poor people access public
services. There, all of the formal systems of accountability are,
more or less, defunct, and there is almost no question of them
working. For example, if your doctor has been rude or is absent,
there is almost no way you, as a poor person, can complain about
that and get any redress. An example would be that you can, however,
get your local patron—your village head-man, or whatever
you have—to come along with you and try to exert that level
of pressure to get services. We have seen that sort of thing.
People use social pressures of all sorts; sometimes the local
schoolteacher will be your relative or your neighbour and so you
can put pressure on them that way. These sorts of informal pressures
are very powerful in a context in which formal mechanisms do not
work. It is quite common in Bangladeshi health centres, where
patients die, for there to be violent outbreaks of riot or protests,
and so on, so that also happens—these sorts of pressures.
They are not desirable, but that is not what I am saying; I am
saying this is what there is in the absence of effective, formal
accountability mechanisms.
Q11 Mr Lancaster: You would not like
to see, for example, DFID or other donors supporting these informal
processes; you would rather them try and battle their way through
in the formal processes?
Dr Hossain: As I said, I think
in a context in which the majority of the population are poor
and illiterate and probably do not really have much experience
of engaging with state institutions, it will be really important
for you to understand how they do, in fact, engage—how they
do, in fact, attempt to get accountability from public service
providers. However, using that, I think, it would be quite a useful
way of developing performance accountability measures. You could
use them in quite a technical way to help develop more effective
monitoring systems for public service providers. I think without
understanding how those things go on, however, you would never
design an effective governance reform.
Mr Sharma: I do sympathise.
Q12 Mr Singh: You argue, and so do
others, that there is a link between good governance and poverty
reduction, yet in Bangladesh there has been some success and some
gains in social and human development. How do you account for
that in the absence of good governance?
Professor Hulme: If I may start
off with that. You have to watch out for this myth of good governance;
yourselves accepted that good governance is something which most
countries are aspiring to, still, and, in a way, good enough government
is what one is trying to get to, at this stage. It is extraordinary
in Bangladesh how imperfect the processes of governance are but
those processes have been sufficient to allow the private sector
to invest and improve its productivity and create jobs and to
allow the voluntary sector to function, and to allow parts of,
certainly, local government and parts of the civil service to
function. In a way it is how to move towards this "good-enough"
governance.
Q13 Chairman: That rather reinforces
the business view that the less government there is the better.
So anarchy is fine for business and investment.
Professor Hulme: Not at all. I
am not a macroeconomist but the macroeconomic policies that have
been in place in Bangladesh for the last 15 years have allowed
the economy to grow, far from what many economists would prescribe
as the best set of policies. There has been a degree of stability
which has worked there. So, in a way, that element of governance
has worked reasonably effectively.
Q14 Mr Singh: To what extent, in
terms of social development and infant mortality rates, etc, is
that down to good or very good NGOs and their service delivery?
Dr Hossain: Part of the explanation
is, certainly, the big NGOs are delivering very effective services,
but that is definitely, by no means, the full story. Government
service delivery is also important for this—there is no
doubt about that. You have put your finger on something really
important, which is we do not really understand what happened
in that period in the 1990s, up until the early/mid-2000s, when
Bangladesh had a lot of great achievements in human and social
development, while governance was not improving, including at
the sectoral level. It is a really interesting question. I think
part of the answer lies in these issues that I was talking about
with respect to informal accountability. Stuff goes on on the
ground that we do not really have a good handle on because our
gaze is always at this level of the formal accountability mechanisms,
which are just defunct. So if we lower our gaze a little bit and
look at what is going on at that sort of frontline level, it does
help a bit to understand. The World Bank has some explanation
for it; they say—what do they call it, when you have institutional
cherry-picking—you have a few pockets of excellence, pockets
of success. I do not think that is the full story either. There
was also a very strong social demand for, for example, women's
education, possibly resulting from, among other things, a demand
for garment workers. What that has meant has been that more educated
women has, of course, knock-on effects, as we know, for infant
mortality and the demand for children's education, and so on.
So there have been a number of factors. Nobody knows the full
story.
Professor Hulme: If I could just
add, it is as Naomi is saying; being academics we say everything
is complicated but these informal processes—it is not that
they do not work, but they do not work like the rulebook says
they should be working—there are norms in that, and resources
are pilfered and not used properly, but there are limits on that,
and if people start giving old-aged pensions not to old women
but to men who are not of sufficient age then the social sanction
comes in, and that will not be allowed and the local government
will stop that. People may be able to slip 10% of the food aid
programme but if it gets to 20% then, again, some informal processes
of governance will kick in; the formal system may not be working
but there are boundaries. So it is never anarchy; it is not the
way it is supposed to be, but it is not anarchy, and there are
social norms which, if people go past them, will kick in. The
most concrete example I can think of is an old woman getting a
pension where the chairman of the local parish was taking a commission
on it. Another member found out and she said: "I'll tell
everybody that you're stealing from old women", and so he
stopped doing it because he did not want people to know that he
was stealing from old women, and so she gets a full pension now.
These processes are operating in their own way.
Dr Hossain: I think these are
the sorts of things that, with some exploration and some careful
work, could be supported more effectively than they currently
are.
Professor Hulme: Rather than looking
at the rulebook and it not working, if DFID staff could spend
time trying to work out could more councillors be concerned about
pensions.
Chairman: We may explore that a little
bit more in a moment.
Q15 John Battle: I think the next
question is the extent to which the basic delivery of services
(you hint at it there) are undermined by the government, in a
way, by accountability. For example, in which sectors would you
say the provision of parallel services by NGOs, who are trying
to provide services, actually undermine what the government should
be doing, so we do not get this balance at all and the government
starts to provide properly, but they are always on the margins
trying to check what everybody else is doing? Is that what you
are saying is happening? You gave the example of the pensions—not
to go into that example—but to what extent is that delivery
of basic services actually undermined by the efforts of NGOs then?
Dr Hossain: There is, undeniably,
that danger. I have not, actually, seen any evidence in Bangladesh
that that has happened. I think, especially with the big NGOs
and the big programmes of social service delivery—health
and education and so on, and microfinance, perhaps, in particular—on
the whole, the NGOs appear to me to be supplying services in areas
where government is not supplying services, and supplying services
that government is not supplying; chiefly, non-formal education
in areas that government cannot or will not reach—the groups
that government cannot or will not reach—and certain sorts
of health services that government cannot. Also, I am thinking,
in particular, of BRAC, which is the NGO I know best because I
worked for them for five or six years. A lot of the time their
health programmes, in particular, were partnerships with government,
and so you had quite effective joint working around issues. Also,
I think, in some cases, with respect to education, there was some
extent to which there was a kind of positive competition which
arose around the education of the poor, in particular, where BRAC
had reached villages and communities that the government were
not reaching. This was something of a spur for government to expand
its service delivery, which is primary education, basically. I
do not think, in a country like Bangladesh, where there is so
much unmet need, that there is much evidence that NGOs have undermined
public service delivery.
Q16 John Battle: If I put it another
way: I have never been before to Bangladesh but the impression
that I have got—not that there is much to go on—is
that some of the popular participation in the best sense is some
of the best in the world. If people are not getting resources
from the centre they have got to survive, so they have built up
some form of informal institutions to deliver. I think, as a politician,
as it were—and I am going to take the power back off them—they
have got the power, they are doing it now, so I would resent them,
in a way, doing that. I know that I cannot cut off their livelihood
but, at the same time, I find a tension between what was going
on on the ground, yet, at the same time, if I was a slightly more
progressive politician, I might say that model of doing things
might be the right way to do it and it might be a good model to
use elsewhere.
Professor Hulme: I do not know
about using it elsewhere but the NGOs do work very effectively
in Bangladesh, and one needs to work with what works, not look
at the models—ideal models—of how government should
function. So we need to work with the NGOs and keep them on. I
used to worry about them displacing the Bangladeshi state but
I do not really do that now because there is so much need. They
are an incredible resource; they do create new organisational
technologies and new products, like microfinance, like low-cost
education. The government is not taking that on now but it could
take it on in the future. There are hundreds of thousands—maybe
a million—of pretty good staff working for them; that is
a resource which the government and the private sector does draw
on, at times; it pulls them in. So, theoretically, there is that
undermining but, in practice, I see the NGOs as part of Bangladeshi's
evolution that will be positive.
Q17 John Battle: If I put the question
the other way: which areas of policy or services should the government
focus on because the NGOs are delivering in that other area? Do
you know what I mean? Is there one area that government should
be focusing on because the NGOs are picking up the policy area?
Professor Hulme: Infrastructure.
The NGOs cannot do big infrastructure; it is really important
that the government does that well. The other sorts of problems
remain: health and education. I think we would look at social
protection. While the NGOs are moving into social protection,
could they take on social protection on the scale that is required?
Infrastructure, health, education and social protection.
Q18 Mr Sharma: Crime, violence and
insecurity are the major issues in Bangladesh. What forms of insecurity
are experienced by ordinary people and why are women more frequently
the victims of crime and violence?
Dr Hossain: It was only very recently,
in the last few years, that this has really begun to emerge. Bangladesh
is not known as a place where there are high levels of crime and
violence, apart from political violence. In fact, it is testament
to DFID's ability to pinpoint important issues that they did start
to do an analysis of human security first, and to support the
work of Safer World. Safer World also produced some human security
assessments. I was involved with one of those—we did a very
large survey of experiences of crime and insecurity and violence,
and it is at quite a low level, was what we found; quite low-level
but chronic threats of theft and minor forms of violence, and
so on. To be honest, domestic violence is, probably, the single
greatest human insecurity threat that people in Bangladesh face.
The WHO has also done work on this in Bangladesh—women-based
violence from their partners is among the highest rates in the
world. It seems like such a very simple conclusion to draw but,
actually, I think it is probably the greatest source of insecurity.
What is interesting about this, and what is important about this
(not easy to capture for policy purposes) is the fact that, to
some extent, it is not so much the experience of crime and insecurity
as the response to the threat of crime and insecurity, or violence,
that seems to be quite important; the way people cope, the way
women's mobility is curtailed because people are frightened that
they will be abused or, you know, beaten or raped; the way people
fail to invest in their businesses and their livelihoods—these
sorts of things. I think the evidence is only beginning to emerge
that that adverse coping is something that is difficult to explore
but it seems to be the response that is most troubling.
Q19 Mr Sharma: What are the informal
mechanisms and institutions which can help protect people from
violence and crime? How should donor programmes aimed at justice
sector reform take these into account?
Dr Hossain: Again, as I responded
to you, I think it is useful in a country like Bangladesh to approach
governance from the bottom up, from how people experience these
things. A lot of work has already gone on in Bangladesh over the
years on the customary dispute resolution—what they call
the "Shalish"—the village-based systems for resolving
fights and problems. These are typically around land and marital
problems—typically, around 80% of them, or something like
that. DFID has done quite a lot of work supporting the NGOs who
have been working in this area; NGOs have come in to try and make
things a bit fairer—things are very traditional and, in
some ways, quite biased against women, against poor people and
against minorities and so on. So the NGOs have come in in quite
a big way. There is another aspect to it which has not been explored
much. Again, this work that I was involved with, in looking at
crime and insecurity, uncovered what they call Pahara Committees.
This is very well known—anyone you speak to will know what
a Pahara Committee is; it is just neighbourhood watch, basically—but
these seem to be very, very common. We found something like a
third of all the respondents in our survey knew of such a thing
in their community. When we asked people how they responded to
incidents of crime and violence, and so on (I forgot to get the
numbers out for you), they were greatly more likely to approach
people in their community for help or their neighbourhood watch
or their local patron than they were to approach the police for
help. These institutions are there, and this is not only in Bangladesh
that we are discovering that informal institutions are very powerful;
the evidence is emerging that this is the case, I think, with
respect to policing.
|
