Next generation trends in community management – toward the

Beyond the problems with financial sustainability, the community management approach can be placed as a subset of a broader movement that can be summarised as the ‘participatory turn’ in development thinking (Chambers, 1983, 2008). This concept of participation has been the subject of a vast and often highly critical literature (Brown and Ashman, 1996; Cleaver, 1999;

Cornwall and Brock, 2005; Hickey and Mohan, 2005; Mansuri and Rao, 2004).

It is a contested term which has been criticised as a meaningless “development buzzword” (Cornwall and Brock, 2005) that too often becomes materialised as a

“managerial exercise” (Cleaver, 1999). Yet the concept of participation, however it is defined (an issue tackled below), is part of the justification for community management (Harvey and Reed, 2006) especially in the early literature (McCommon et al., 1990; Paul, 1987).

Some research has shown that a high level of community participation is associated with successful rural water services (Paul, 1987; Prokopy, 2005).

However, it has also been shown that the ability to participate is uneven across communities and a focus on participation often leads to patronage (i.e. a reinforcement of the existing, often unequal, power relations found in rural communities) (Chowns, 2014; Isham et al., 2002). More generally, the prevailing levels of unsustainability in services in places such as Sub-Saharan Africa where participation has been a policy focus has led to an increasing scepticism about the relationship between highly participatory rural water services and the long-term sustainability of services (Broek and Brown, 2015;

Jones, 2011; Marks and Davis, 2012).

This thesis positions participation as a still untested assumption that underpins the initial community management paradigm and therefore will seek to measure it within the research. For this purpose, the research tracks the definition of participation back to its popularisation within the community development movement in the United States of America in the 1960s. Sherry Arnstein defines it as a “categorical term for citizen power” and proposed a ladder that reflects the different degrees of participation that citizens can have in a planning and development process (Arnstein, 1969). Similar ladders have been developed for measuring participation in development projects (Bolt and Fonseca, 2001;

Dayal et al., 2000; Deverill et al., 2002; Lammerink and de Jong, 1999). In the next methodology chapter, such a ladder is adapted to help measure the degree of decision-making power that community institutions have in different stages of the service delivery cycle. For now, it is important to note that the

“participatory turn” has fundamentally shaped ideas around appropriate development in rural areas although it is an increasingly questioned condition for success, especially in the more recent literature.

Instead, in the contemporary practice-orientated literature, there is growing focus on the perceived importance of professionalising service delivery (Le Gouais and Webster, 2011; Lockwood and Smits, 2011). Professionalisation is about moving the community management model from one that relies on

community members volunteering time and using ad hoc management techniques, to a model whereby properly qualified, paid-for-staff complete the operation and maintenance tasks, but decision-making power remains within an appropriate community institution (Lockwood and Smits, 2011). The professionalisation of rural water services has been associated with a shift to the private sector away from community management (Le Gouais and Webster, 2011). This thesis rejects that as being necessarily true and instead hypotheses that professionalisation can happen within the community management model based on a number of potential forms:

 “The adoption of good business practices, such as billing, book keeping and auditing, systematic carrying out operation and maintenance tasks, managing customer relations, etc. One of the examples of this is the Programa de Cultura Empresarial (business culture programme), ran by the Government of Colombia which sought to professionalise the community-based service providers, retaining their non-for-profit status, but promoting good business practices and hiring of paid-for staff (Tamayo and Gracia, 2006).

 The contracting of paid-for staff, such as plumbers or an administrator to carry out the different functions as a dedicated task. In larger and more complex systems, such as multi-village schemes serving rural growth centres, CBOs may fully contract out all these operational functions.

 Calling down professional support. This refers to cases where the CBO proactively seeks and obtains support from a professional support agent. It requires professionalism of the CBO to recognise its limitations and the willingness to contract specialised support.” (Smits et al. (2015, pp. 22–23)

The emphasis on professionalisation rather than participation in community service delivery is considered to reflect a shift in thinking towards a community management plus approach. The research will therefore attempt to test whether the shift to professionalisation is reflected in the Indian landscape.

The call for professionalisation is also considered to be part of the same movement that advocates a shift towards more structured support services to communities throughout the service delivery cycle (Bakalian and Wakeman, 2009; Baumann, 2006; Kleemeier, 2000; Lockwood and Smits, 2011;

Lockwood, 2002, 2004). This often practice-orientated literature suggests the major challenge in contemporary community management is about how to institutionalise this more bipartite sense of responsibility between communities and support agencies. This section now presents the evidence collected as part of a systematic review into the success factors found in successful community

managed rural water services programmes around the world (Hutchings et al., 2015- the full paper is provided via Appendix A). The study compiled case studies largely from the grey literature from 1980 to 2010 scanning over 2,544 potential cases of community management in low and lower middle income countries. This led to a sample of 174 case studies that was refined down to 72 of the most successful case studies of community managed rural water supplies for further interrogation to understand the basis for success in community management.

Focusing on the types of external support provided across the cases, as shown in Figure 2, the review showed that direct financial and/or material support is found in over 90% of successful community management programmes. Other common forms of support were capacity building of management and capacity building of technical skills. The study showed that there was not much standardisation in the support services with many case studies not documenting such support despite being reported as successful cases of community managed rural water services.

This demonstrates that there have been many cases of successful community management that do not follow the community management plus model which are still successful. The systematic review also highlighted the importance of what can be described as ‘internal community plus’ factors which were characteristics of communities where successful cases were found. These highlighted characteristics that were classified as collective initiative, strong leadership and institutional transparency at the community service provider level (Hutchings et al., 2015). This raises an important point that although much focus in the contemporary community management literature has been the discussion of external support, the characteristics and contexts of communities are still likely to have a significant impact on success in service delivery.

Figure 2-3 - External support functions provided in the most successful cases of community management (Hutchings et al. 2015)

This section has explained a number of contemporary trends in the community management literature. It has highlighted the link with the ‘participatory turn’ in development which is increasingly called into question, then focused on the perceived importance of professionalisation and support to community service delivery. Such factors are considered to reflect some general hypotheses that need further investigation, as clarified at the end of this chapter.

2.2.4 Theorising contemporary trends in community management