NGO "ANOTHER WAY" (STICHTING BAKENS VERZET), NETHERLANDS, SUSTAINABLE INTEGRATED SELF-FINANCING DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS AND ADVANCED DEVELOPMENT TECHNOLOGIES

“The best economic and environmentally sound solutions are place-based, diverse according to region, and are responsive to local communities and social needs.” ( Lake O.O., Rights of Nature : Planting Seeds of Real Change, Global Exchange, San Francisco, 2012.)

“A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present- day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form….. a nation has no more right than a king does to say to a province: "You belong to me, I am seizing you." A province, as far as I am concerned, is its inhabitants; if anyone has the right to be consulted in such an affair, it is the inhabitant.”

( Ernest Renan, What is a nation?, Lecture at the Sorbonne, 11 January 1882. English version accessed at the www.tamilnation.org website on 06 March,

2013. For the original text in French see : http://www.bmlisieux.com/archives/nation01.htm ).

“If nature were in charge of creating an enduring human economy, she would surely apply the same principles she applies in natural systems. Her goal would be a global system of bioregional living economies that secure a healthy, happy, productive life for every person on the planet in symbiotic balance with the non-human systems on which we humans depend for breathable air, drinkable water, fertile soils, timber, fish, grasslands, and climate stability. Each bioregional economy would meet its own needs for energy, water, nutrients, and mineral resources through sustained local capture, circular flow, utilization, and repurposing. Decision making would be local and the system would organize from the bottom up. Diversity and redundancy would support local adaptation and resilience.” ( D.Korten, What Would a Down-to-Earth Economy Look Like?, YES ! Magazine, Bainbridge Island, 21 January, 2013.)

According to F.M. Lappé in Before You Give Up on Democracy, Read This!, (The Huffington Post, New York, 18 September, 2013.) three conditions are needed to meet the three virtual human needs of connection, meaning, and power. They are :

The fluid, continuous dispersion of power.
Transparency in human relations.
Cultures of mutual accountability, instead of one-way blame.

This is what integrated development structures are about.

The principle of subsidiarity.

In Section 1 Anthropological analysis at three levels of Block 3, especially in part 05. Management lines an analysis was made of the general architecture of integrated development projects.

It was seen that the structures to be set up pass vertically up the three administrative levels, finishing with the central committee.

During this section 2 of Block 3 an elementary analysis will be made of the tasks given to each of the three management levels.

“The principle of subsidiarity – devolving decision-making to as local as appropriate- should be promoted.” (Verzola P. (Jr) and Quintos P., Green Economy : Gain or Pain for the Earth’s Poor, IBON International, Quezon City, November, 2011.)

Concepts of nesting and subsidiarity

The concept of subsidiarity is one of the basic principles of the European Union. The Europa Glossary sourced 9 November, 2009 explains the concept of subsidiarity this way :

“Subsidiarity

The glossary is being updated given the recent signing of the Treaty of Lisbon.

The principle of subsidiarity is defined in Article 5 of the Treaty establishing the European Community. It is intended to ensure that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen and that constant checks are made as to whether action at Community level is justified in the light of the possibilities available at national, regional or local level. Specifically, it is the principle whereby the Union does not take action (except in the areas which fall within its exclusive competence) unless it is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level. It is closely bound up with the principles of proportionality and necessity, which require that any action by the Union should not go beyond what is necessary to achieve the objectives of the Treaty.

The Edinburgh European Council of December 1992 issued a declaration on the principle of subsidiarity, which lays down the rules for its application. The Treaty of Amsterdam took up the approach that follows from this declaration in a Protocol on the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality annexed to the EC Treaty. Two of the things this Protocol introduces are the systematic analysis of the impact of legislative proposals on the principle of subsidiarity and the use, where possible, of less binding Community measures.”

1. Opinion.

On one page explain how the principles of subsidiarity expressed by the European Union apply to the structures of integrated development projects.

In its directive on decentralisation dated 28 August 2001, (in French) the GTZ Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rechnische Zusammenarbeit (the German development aid agency) writes:

« 1. Importance [of subsidiarity] with regard to development policy

Decentralisation contributes to the forming of framework conditions on political and administrative levels according to the principle of subsidiarity.

Decentralised structures :

•= can contribute to poverty reduction while guaranteeing flexible and innovative services best suited to real needs at a cost lower than that of centralised structures ;

•= offer possibilities for the participation, especially of poor populations (men and women), in the political process, thereby stopping democracy from becoming a project for the middle urban (rich) classes only ;

•= can contribute to better conflict management and the conservation of peace, since pertinent structures and strategies for the peaceful resolution of conflicts and a system of elections at several levels (power verticalisation) protect the populations from the negative effects of constant, paralysing confrontations to obtain power at national level ;

•= provide obstacles to redistribution of wealth in the benefit a rich local minority, so that resources at local level are no longer lost through «captation» at higher levels;

•= offer possibilities for local self-promotion by poor populations and appropriate support for their business initiatives. » (Translation T.E.Manning).

2. Opinion.

On one page write 5 short paragraphs showing how the benefits listed by the GTZ are applied within the framework of integrated development concepts.

In this connection refer also to Marshall J.R., Nesting, subsidiarity, and community based environmental governance beyond the local level, International Journal of the Commons, Vol. 2 no.1, January 2008, pp. 73-97, Igitur, Utrecht Publishing & Archiving Services for IASC, Utrecht 2008.

On page 80, Marshall states:

« Interpreting subsidiarity

The focus on the problem of assigning tasks across governance levels has revolved largely around the ‘principle of subsidiarity’. Although various definitions of this principle exist, they generally share in common the implication that any particular task should be decentralized to the lowest level of governance with the capacity to conduct it satisfactorily. The original justification for this principle was moral, stemming from ‘a conviction that each human individual is endowed with an inherent and inalienable worth, or dignity’, and accordingly that all social groupings should ultimately be at the service of the individual [Source cited :British Institute of International and Comparative Law, BIIC, 2003. Subsidiarity: A preliminary discussion paper. Paper presented at Lisbon International Symposium on Global Drug Policy, 23-24 October, Lisbon.BIIC 2003, p. 2.] This conviction implied that a higher level of organization should refrain from undertaking tasks that could be performed just as well by a grouping closer to the individual. The principle is now also widely hypothesized to have practical advantages for large-scale social problems. Schumacher (1973) drew public attention to these advantages when, in Small is Beautiful, he invoked subsidiarity as a key principle for successful large-scale organization. The nations of Europe adopted this principle as one of the central constitutional principles for the European Union (made effective with the signing of the Amsterdam Treaty in 1999).

The relevance of this principle to community-based governance of larger-scale environmental problems has not gone unnoticed by common property scholars. For instance, McKean [ Source cited : McKean, M.A. 2002. Nesting institutions for complex common-pool resource systems. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Landscape Futures, December 2001, eds. J. Graham, I.R. Reeve, and D.J. Brunckhorst. Armidale: Institute for Rural Futures and University of New England.2002, p. 8] proposed that the advantages of small groups in achieving voluntary cooperation be extended to large-scale common pool resource problems by means of “nested groups … with subsidiarity” .

Consistent with the definition given above, McKean’s (2002, p. 10) understanding of the subsidiarity principle is that it requires all tasks to be performed at the lowest possible level of governance. She proposed the following rule for deciding how low ‘possible’ is: an individual subunit of the governance system is free to undertake all the tasks that do not affect anyone in another subunit, ‘but we move up a notch to a higher level if a subunit wants to engage in behaviour that will affect any other subunit’. Hence, any task is centralized to higher, more inclusive, levels until a level is reached where all individuals with a substantive interest in the task are represented adequately. »

[For the Schumacher (1973) reference see : Schumacher E.F. Small is Beautiful, Economics as if People Mattered, first edition Blond & Briggs, London, 1973 ; second edition Hartley & Marks, Vancouver, 1999 ISBN 0-88179-169-5. For some quotations from Schumacher’s book see website : http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/about/efs_quotes.htm . ]

R. Schleiser-Tappeser in How renewables will change electricity markets in the next five years, (Elsevier, Energy-Policy (2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2012.04.042) refers in his conclusion (Section 4) to the self-organisational and chaotic elements implicit in the application of the subsidiarity principle to energy supplied at the lowest possible market level. This is typical of integrated development projects where energy used in a given project area is expected to by sustainably generated and consumed there.

3. Opinion.

Write one page explaining the relation between integrated development concepts and the concept cited above that «each human individual is endowed with an inherent and inalienable worth, or dignity. »

On page 93, Marshall concludes that:

« 1. [One must] Allocate tasks across levels in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity; i.e., decentralize each task to the lowest level with capacity to conduct it satisfactorily.

2. The capacity at a given level to conduct a task satisfactorily depends partly on whether all actors with an interest in the task are represented at that level.

3. The capacity at a given level to perform a task satisfactorily depends also on whether there is sufficient access at that level to all the capacities needed to

achieve that standard of performance.

4. The capacity at a given level to perform a task satisfactorily can often be enhanced through strategies seeking to strengthen access to the requisite capacities. Subsidiarity obliges actors at higher levels to explore such opportunities before ruling out the possibility of decentralizing tasks to lower levels.

Meanwhile, it cautions against over-optimistic expectations of how quickly lower-level capacities to cope with decentralization can be developed.

5. Actors tend to participate in activities designed to build their capacities only when they expect participation to help further their goals. Capacity-building

efforts are therefore unlikely to succeed unless the target population has secure rights to benefit from the capacities developed.

6. Units assigned tasks in accordance with the subsidiarity principle should be allowed as much autonomy as possible in how they decide to conduct those

tasks.

7. Despite any rhetoric to the contrary, government actors often perceive a vested interest in resisting authentic application of the subsidiarity principle. Their

success in resisting derives just as much from fiscal dominance and cognitive hegemony as it does from formalised powers. When authentic subsidiarity does occur, this is often due to strategic bottom-up efforts to overcome this resistance by mobilizing a bandwagon of support from higher levels. (p.93) »

With regard to the Millennium development goals, most of the activities required are elementary. Neither consultants and specialist from industrialised countries nor «advanced » technologies are needed..

Indications were given in Section. 2 : Relate the Millennium Goals to the services listed in block 1 on how integrated development projects make the execution of most of the necessary activities at the lowest level. This level is not that of the tank commission, but that of the individual household. For instance, through the installation of ecological composting sanitation systems at household with recycling on site of urine and grey water for food production (food security) many problems are solved in one blow. Especially where financial structures are introduced enabling them to be made, installed, and maintained without the need for formal money resources.

4. Opinion.

Make a nine-paragraph analysis on how Marshall’s conclusions are respected in integrated development projects. You are, of course, free to express criticisms and doubts and to make your own suggestions. Your paragraphs are :

1) Very short introduction.

2) Decentralisation at the lowest level.

3) Generalised exploitation of all available capacities at each level.

4) Proper representation at each level.

5) Support from higher levels for the lower levels to favour execution of most activities at the lowest levels.

6) The certainty that participants receive direct benefits for themselves and their families.

7) Autonomy of initiative, especially at basic levels.

8) Safeguard of traditional administrative and political structures so that they can benefit from the planned decentralisation as well.

9) Your conclusion.

◄ ►

◄ Third block : Section 2 : Division of responsibilities.

◄ Third block : Solutions to the problems.