Food, Development, and Politics in the Middle East by Marvin G. Weinbaum

Author:Marvin G. Weinbaum [Weinbaum, Marvin G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317411673
Google: RyE-CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-07-24T05:59:22+00:00

Policy Implementation: Center and Periphery

A wide gap is normally found between those who formulate and promulgate policies and those who implement decisions. The former have little capacity to monitor performance or ensure compliance. The latter, in turn, are never certain of their superiors’ full commitment in resources, personnel, and materials. In either case, development plans often bear little correspondence to their application in the fields and villages. Only a modest overlap exists between an official’s supposed realm of authority and his actual scope of effectiveness. Poor communications between personnel in the capital’s bureaucracies and those at the provincial level are largely to blame. The failure of intermediary structures to transmit information up to policymakers and down to farmers is frequently noted. A fundamental problem nearly everywhere is the small base of skilled and motivated fieldworkers. But the ambivalence of top political leaders and senior officials toward their own policies, and their lack of sustained attention to them, are no less important. It is rare that the same energies that go into starting up a program are also devoted to seeing it through.

Announcements of new agricultural projects or food production targets are designed to give the impression that the government is both concerned about and capable of inducing desired change. These activities are, however, less directives than exhortations to those who in fact can shape outcomes. It is almost as though the approval of an undertaking is synonymous with its realization. This distance between prescription and execution means that aspirations and weak gestures usually substitute for carefully designed blueprints. And what decisions are made somehow fail to filter down through the top-heavy agricultural bureaucracy, least of all to the operational level. When they do, they are as often as not misunderstood, ignored, or deliberately flouted.

Higher-ranking officials typically have an unrealistic set of expectations about the feasibility of policies or the prevailing conditions in the countryside. Desk-bound, they seldom venture into the field and then rarely for more than token visits. This does little to rectify the preconceptions of decision makers based on faulty data and inappropriately applied notions of development and rural life. Although higher officials are generally competent in economics and well versed through foreign travel and conferences in the latest technical advances, most remain unfamiliar with or insensitive to the day-to-day problems of the cultivator and the social implications of policy. In the climate of expectation and change of the 1970s, ministries and other government agencies were eager to fashion new policies, too often with insufficient consideration of what was required for their successful implementation. Not a few agricultural schemes, including some wellpublicized ventures with foreign governments, were conveniently dropped when the full dimensions of the necessary commitment were appreciated.

The success of any agricultural development policy ultimately rests on the cooperation, capabilities, and resources available at the district and field levels. It is there that the most formidable obstacles to the implementation of service activities, public works, and agrarian reform are encountered. Inadequate public funding accounts in part for

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