Robert Buddan, Contributor
SOCIETIES WANT governments to employ more, pay more, and earn more at the same time. Governments do not have a formula for this. To even begin to contemplate this possibility, we have to acknowledge a quiet change that has been taking place in development thinking over the last few years.
Francis Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy and neoconservative development planner in the U.S. State Department, wrote in 1992 that with the collapse of communism, liberal democracy and capitalism had triumphed as the best model of governance. Ideological conflicts as we had known them would end leading to his dubious thesis, 'the end of history'.
Fukuyama has now wised up. In his new book of 2004, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, he argues that failed and weak states, not communism or Islamic fundamentalism, pose the greatest threat to world order, and conflict has not gone away after all. History has not ended. It still has a long way to go.
STATE CAPACITY AND DEVELOPMENT
Fukuyama says that what developing countries need are strong state institutions. The task of nation-building must begin with state building. Weak states need assistance from outside. However, success will only come when outsiders understand local cultures and norms, and when local officials who will be running these institutions are included in their development. A country like Haiti comes immediately to mind.
Fukuyama confesses to the missteps and misunderstandings of the international (western) community. It is not the markets that will magically deliver countries from failure. Markets and everything else need well-functioning political institutions with effective state capacity. Effective administration is the key precondition for economic development. Outsiders actually often make things worse. They weaken state capacity. In Jamaica we know this well from our experience with the IMF.
Fukuyama now believes that multilateral efforts that build democratic states are better than unilateral aid giving and other forms of insensitive western intervention. This is something that development agencies, from USAID to CIDA, must think about. Fukuyama also now believes that the dogmatic reliance on privatisation and the seeding of civil society organisations that continue to depend on western aid were mistakes. He says the international community is actually complicit in the destruction of institutional capacity in many developing countries.
LESSONS FOR THE CARIBBEAN
Fukuyama did not have the Commonwealth Caribbean in mind when he wrote of failed or failing states. He had Iraq, Haiti, Afghanistan, East Timor, Sudan and such others in mind. But many of his arguments apply to the western aid mentality in the Caribbean, and are important for what we understand the purpose of national governments to be. Governments must build capacity and aid agencies should try and help, not the other way around.
It will take more than a book, albeit written by a neoconservative darling of the west, to change the long-standing culture of donor agencies. But this is absolutely necessary. Had western donors not insisted on a thousand of their own conditions for Haiti since its 1990 elections, that country would be better off today. Instead, Haiti collapsed into a failed state and has to start over again. It is not too late for the western community to share some of the responsibility for failing states in many parts of the world. If Fukuyama's book is to do one thing, it should be to achieve that.
We in the Caribbean should take certain lessons from what Fukuyama has learned. First, as political scholars have insisted all along, the capacity and quality of political institutions matter a great deal to development. Development cannot be left to market institutions alone. We teach political science, political thought, public administration, and international relations to prepare citizens to provide the human capacity for strong developmental state institutions
BUILDING BROADER CAPACITY FOR DEVELOPMENT
Second, we should learn that government and governance, politics and politicians matter, and that the state is critical for building society's broader capacity for development. Ministries of government combine significant human, technical, political, and administrative resources that can convert a country's physical, social, and economic assets to great productive gain. Ministers must be convinced of this and ministries must be structured effectively and combined strategically for this.
A third critical lesson is that local knowledge matters. Foreign experts are fine but they must know their limitations. They cannot model developing countries off their own. Other cultures, their knowledge, experience, and forms of social capital are legitimate, useful, and valuable. Locals have their own creative ways of doing things.
The Caribbean must rely on creative governance. This means using what we have creatively and creating what we don't have, rather than depending on what others choose to give us, with what they give us to choose, and for what they intend. It is fine to accept help. But help is no substitute for self-reliance.
There is another lesson not recognised by Fukuyama and the development community at all. They presume that the assistance needed to develop state capacity can, in all cases, come only and directly from western agencies. This leads to their self-created dilemma. Western countries should help but do not know enough about culture and institution building in non-western societies, thereby contributing to state failure.
The fact is that Caribbean states can do much to assist others to build capacity. Take Haiti. Haiti needs national transportation and electricity systems, help with its fledgling cement industry, a banking and insurance sector, modern land, environment and agricultural systems, a basic health and primary school system, and a competent judicial system. You name it and Haiti needs it. Jamaica and the Caribbean have substantial technical experience in these areas. We can help countries like Haiti. Our state builders have been at it for 50 years.
MARKET GOVERNMENT SERVICES
We can learn something from the market in order to market government services. Markets have a system of franchising services. Governments don't. There is a national and multinational market for government services. The Jamaican government can be a 'multinational corporation' in its own way. International donors can contract our government (private sector and NGO) services. They have the money, we have the technical apparatus, and Haiti has the need.
We have at our disposal retired and laid-off public sector experience and have trained persons whom we cannot afford to employ. We can export our state services. Our electoral office has provided technical help to Haiti. Our police forces have been used in Africa. Jamaica is next door to Haiti but Haitians distrust the west. Since Jamaica had insisted on new elections in Haiti it can now put its government at the service of Haitian development.
Jamaica can create a new government market, the market for international development. Haiti needs tourism, airport and seaport development. It needs highways. It needs ICT. We have public sector plans and private sector contractors. Haiti needs a modern planning institute. We can also help to organise the large Haitian diaspora.
We should invite the international donor community to pay the Government of Jamaica for services to develop Haitian social, economic and physical infrastructure. Government can be an agency for international development funded by international aid. Government would earn towards its own upkeep and to support more domestic services at the same time.
The international community has pledged over a billion U.S. dollars to Haiti, and president-elect Preval will convene a second donor conference in Haiti in the summer to ask for more. We should attend and make our case. Contracts worth US$100 million would cover the cost of a ministry. That's sensible government economy. The new Minister of Foreign Affairs should look into this.
Robert Buddan is a lecturer in the department of Government at the University of the West Indies. You can send your comments to robert.buddan@uwimona.edu.jm
