Local organizations for sustainable development: The political environment of community-based organizations in western Kenya

Abstract

The experience with the quest to realize sustainable development, especially at the local level, has left a disappointing legacy for the majority of African countries. The adoption of development from below paradigm in the 1980s, which presented the 'bottom-up' approach to the realization of sustainable development as an alternative to the previous 'top-down' approach, has since generated a lot of interest in the role of local organizations among development scholars and researchers. Throughout the 1990s, local organizations were viewed as the panacea for the problem of realizing sustainable development at the local level. Nevertheless, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on what local organizations can actually achieve in this regard. Questions have been raised as to what type of local organization can make a contribution to sustainable development and in which social, economic and political contexts? This study identifies communitybased organizations (CBOs) as one type of the local organizations and assesses their contribution to sustainable development in the context of their political environment in Western Kenya. \ 'Development from below' paradigm provides the analytical framework for the study. It posits that for sustainable development to be realized, people ought to be enabled to take control of their lives and secure better livelihoods, with the ownership and control of indigenous productive assets as the basic element in this regard. It is argued that this occurs through people's participation in the activities for securing their livelihoods; a process that enables them to build their capacity to initiate durable development activities III response to their peculiar social, economic and political environments. The study is, therefore, premised on the assumption that members' popular participation in the activities of CBOs is a prerequisite for the realization of sustainable development at the local level; and that popular participation is a function of the internal leadership and management structures as well as the external political environment in which CBOs operate. Both quantitative and qualitative techniques were used to collect primary data in a survey of these organizations in four districts of Western Kenya. A self-administered questionnaire was used to interview 350 members of 80 CBOs. The samples of the members and organizations were drawn using a variety of sampling techniques at various v stages of the survey. These included purposive sampling, stratified sampling, systematic sampling and simple random sampling. Informal and focused group discussions were also held with key informants, including selected members of these organizations and government administrators to obtain qualitative data. Secondary data from published books and articles as well as unpublished reports from government departments supplemented these primary data. The findings of the study show that though CBOs have been instrumental in facilitating local people's access to resources for improving their livelihoods, they are largely dependent on external assistance to fund their activities. This dependency has been attributed to the politics of patronage that is prevalent in Western Kenya. In order to align themselves to the local patrons that facilitate these organizations' access to external sources of funds and other resources, the tendency has been for most CBOs to elect or select persons into leadership who can forge or have working relationships with the said patrons. By virtue of the positions that they occupy in the local patron-client networks and the assistance that they draw for their organizations, such leaders have subsequently dominated the leadership and management processes in most CBOs; leaving members to play the functional roles of contributing and sharing resources and services. The resultant functional participation has adversely affected local level capacity building for sustainable development. Indeed, most of the projects of these organizations do not have the capacity to replicate their activities or increase their contribution to rural livelihoods without external assistance. The study, therefore, submits that CBOs are unlikely to make significant contributions to sustainable development in the context of the politics of patronage that is prevalent in Western Kenya. This implies that the neo-liberal assumptions for realizing sustainable development may not be well founded in the context of the political environment that obtains in the region. Since patronage is a major contributor to the dependence of CBOs, which has impeded these organizations from initiating self-sustaining development activities, it is recommended that the on-going democratization process be enhanced through civic education, especially in the rural areas. In addition, external assistance to CBOs should be geared towards building the capacity to mobilize local resources. One way of doing this is to give aid in the form of group guaranteed revolving credit schemes and not handouts.