By: Muse Duale Aden
Are we on track? Introspection is a key if we want to be a change maker. The absence of a significant positive social change in the development context could be due to a number of reasons including good governance and social values. We also need to step back and consider how this influences our development processes, from the micro-individual level to the macro-organizational level. Emmicki Roos (2015) argues that the gap between our values and our actions is, in many cases, too significant. So, if we want to achieve large scale societal transformation, we need to bridge this gap first.
Puntland State is a regional administration covering the North-Eastern part of Somalia and was formed in 1998 as an integral part of the Somali Federal Government. Puntland has known a peaceful transition of power since its beginnings and on January 8, 2019, H.E. Said Abdullahi Deni was elected as the new President of Puntland.
H.E. Deni came into power with an ambitious agenda, but it proved to be challenging to make headway in a context where the administration is aid-dependent, resources are limited, and the administration still is rather weak.
Political decision-making in Puntland remains heavily influenced by interest groups that form alliances to lobby for their preferred investments and priorities. They come from across a spectrum of private businesses, politicians, administrators, and traditional leaders. This complex domestic environment is not only tricky to navigate, but it also makes it very difficult to establish a coherent, longer term development agenda.
This ‘domestic complexity’ is compounded by the dozens of foreign governments, multilateral development organizations, and international advocacy groups seeking to assess the State government’s performance in policy domains of their particular interest including security, justice, health, education, anti-corruption, and public financial management. Each one of them is attempting to influence the State’s policy decisions and actions in ways that may or may not reflect the values and interests of Puntland’s domestic constituencies.
State development plans are one tried and tested tool to create common understanding of development challenges and provide opportunities to create a common agenda. Puntland has a history of producing these plans with the first plan being approved in 2006, covering 2007 – 2011. The second plan covered the period 2013 – 2015, and the third plan covered 2015-2019 but was revised in 2017.
With overall delivery rates between 40% and 50%, these plans were overly ambitious. While these delivery rates are not uncommon in developing countries, they are still being felt by the public as insufficient and carry the risk of reducing the credibility of future plans. While a certain level of flexibility is required to accommodate a rapidly changing environment, massive diversion from agreed upon priorities signals the rather weak status of the development plans in political decision-making.
The latest effort is the Puntland Third Five Year Development Plan (2020-2024). The planning process was officially launched by the President during the government retreat in February 2019 under the motto of “Progressive, Resilient, and Secure Puntland State of Somalia”. The bottom-up planning approach included consultations starting at the lower levels of the state and funneled up through consecutive levels until it reached the top leadership. The stakeholders consulted included groups such as State government agencies, community beneficiaries, private businesses, civil society organizations, resource partners, agencies of the United Nations and the World Bank, as well as other development partners.
The Plan places the State in its operational environment, identifies where the Deni administration is moving in the medium term, and how it intends to realize the Plan’s results and objectives under the mission statement and the vision expressed by the President. The key thematic Areas of the plan are Economic Development, Social, Rule of Law and Security, Political Decentralization and Democratization. It also considered capacity development, disability, human rights, gender, HIV/AIDs, environment, climate change and disaster managementas key cross cutting issues.
The goals and objectives of this plan aim to reduce poverty and improve the livelihood of the people of the State of Puntland. The plan envisions an average overall real GDP growth of 3.6%, while the high-growth scenario stands at 5% and the low-growth scenario at 3%. The principal focus is to create over 700,000 additional jobs. The government development budget is projected as 11.9% of the State GDP.
The administration is facing numerous challenges with the implementation of the plan. These include the sheer enormity of the tasks ahead in terms of poverty reduction, the still weak capacity of the administration itself, the shortage of financing, limited public trust in the government machinery to deliver on its promises, a national political environment in Somalia that is not very conducive, a security situation that remains challenging, the existence of ‘power blocks’ that can influence decisions regardless of the priorities emerging from the development planning process, as well as an international community that is focused on national security and political issues, and less so on the immediate, practical development needs in Puntland.
Within this context and with the experiences of the implementation of the previous plans in mind, a number of issues emerge that need to be taken into consideration to balance these challenges and realize the objectives of the plan. Some of these challenging issues are:
– While lobbying for investments in specific priorities by interest groups – be they domestic or foreign – is simply a fact of life, the credibility of the governance structures is in jeopardy if the democratically and constitutionally established institutions and processes are sidelined. It is of utmost importance to create a high level of public accountability through solidifying decision-making roles of these institutions in a transparent manner. This will counterbalance the non-transparent lobby culture and give insight in performance to the public.
-Government is expected to work towards facilitating the public to realize their development objectives. The trust of the public in the government systems is essential, not only for the overall democratic process, but also for more mundane issues like tax payment. Creating trust in the government machinery is a combination of accountability and transparency generating an overall sentiment that the government is working towards the common good and stimulates engagement of the public not only in designing the development agenda but also in its implementation. Creating mechanisms to facilitate this engagement is a key element in a trustful relationship between citizens and government. This may include regular coordination bodies like public-private sector dialogues, but also taking a more innovative approach towards participatory budgeting, on-line and participatory design of legal or policy instruments or events like innovation challenges to solicit possible approaches and actions to realize development opportunity.
– An important part of creating accountability and transparency is clarity on the expected results. Based on the development plan, tangible indicators to measure results are critical to establish a baseline for accountability. Measuring progress and publishing the results are then the first steps to inform the public. However, it should not stop there. Reporting is a simple mechanical process to document issues; it is not a process for moving towards solutions to challenges or approaches to harness opportunities. The accountability and transparency measures should feed into the engagement arrangements to collectively reflect and create this common approach, common engagement to move ahead.
– While government reporting arrangements are important, they are not the only ones that are relevant. Development analytics is complicated, and the development situation is often open for alternate interpretation; there is no single answer! It is important to create an analytical capacity outside the government to stimulate a rich environment of development debate. It is in this debate that societal capacities can flourish within the overall engagement to understand the development context and formulate approaches to realize the intended outcomes.
– Often, we believe a government machinery is a single, coherent block of agencies working towards consistent institutional outcomes. In most governments, however, this is a far cry from reality and individual government agencies have their own interests that may or may not coincide with the overall development plans. Dedicated efforts to create a high level of coherence and consistency within the government machinery is important to mobilize collective efforts towards the realization of results as well as demonstrating to the public the will and capability of the government to work towards these common goals. This would include, for instance, harmonization of individual agency operational and strategic plans with the overall development plan, design of performance plans and other accountability measures aligned to the state development plan objectives, and – importantly – establishment of solid internal government horizontal and vertical coordination mechanisms to ensure alignment of approach and action.
– Government capacities are often cited as a limiting factor. However, this is most often interpreted as a shortcoming of individual staff member technical skills. This is rarely the most important limiting factor in state performance. Most staff members have more skills than they apply in their job, which means that adding new skills is most likely leading to only adding skills to those that are not being deployed. Hence, something else is determining institutional capacities; in most cases this is related to organizational issues like role and responsibility distribution, job clarity, work-process management, mandate focus versus a collaborative approach, clarity on organizational objectives, physical work-environment and issues around leadership and human resource management that often fail to stimulate staff to deploy all their skills. Tackling government performance would need to take this into consideration.
– Finally, it is about money. Development plans are about investments in social goods or economic opportunity. The financing of the plan is critical and government resources are rarely sufficient nor should they be the sole source of financing for the development action. Stimulating a financing architecture where both government financing, international aid, domestic private sector investment and international private sector investment play a role is required. This requires the non-government actors to buy into the goals of the development plans and be willing to invest. In this sense, the non-government agency accountability vis-à-vis the results of a development plan is just as important as the government accountability.
Development Plans are important tools to consolidate analytics of the development situation and design purposeful priorities to address challenges and opportunities. These plans may lead to common approaches and a large ‘buy-in’ in society. However, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and hence the implementation arrangements are the key towards successful realization of the intended outcomes. This requires engagement not only from government but from other actors in society as well. Establishing the ‘pre-conditions’ to facilitate this engagement often only receives marginal attention in the planning process, however managing the ‘political economy’ is a critical element in successful implementation of the plan.
Muse Duale Aden
Email: [email protected]
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Muse Duale Aden, (MA (Public Administration), MA (Finance & Economics), PG Dip (Dev), BBA), has been working with the UN for more than 15 years and worked with the Puntland State Administration as Director. The opinions voiced in this article don not necessary represent the opinion of UN
Reference
- Rod Hague and Martin Harrop (2013), Comparative Government and Politics (9th ed.), UK
- Damien K, John M, Janet H, Mark M & Matthew C (2012), International Development – Issues and challenges (2nd ed.) UK.
- Simon B, Maureen M, Willian B & March W (2004), Making the International: economic interdependence and political order (1st ed)
- Mike Bourne & Pippa Bourne (2015). Achieving High Performance (2nd ed.). UK.
- Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal (2003), Reframing Organizations (3rd ed.) USA.
- Five Year Puntland Development Plan -3 2020-2024 (2021 April 6) retrieved from http://pl.statistics.so/
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