Principios de interpretación

One of the most significant differences between the UN and World Bank related to the conceptual development and interpretation of ―enabling‖ as it defined the parameters for

65 establishing the principal actors and agents to be targeted, addressed or overlooked by policy that evolved out of the process. Furthermore the significance of this conceptual difference is in its effect of determining the trajectory of the methodological and operational differences that flowed from it. Smith (1999) and Wils and Helmsing (2001) provide extensive

discussions of the conceptual differences between the UN and the World Bank in the

definition and interpretation of the ―enabling‖ principles and the discussion that follows takes its root and departures from these principal analyses. The conceptual differences between the UN and the World Bank emerge from their respective positions taken on the constitutive and distinct social formations that characterise society and the relationships that exist between these social formations. The distinct formations comprise the state, civil society and markets with each also comprising their respective organisational and institutional elements.

Generally, as noted earlier in Sections 3.3.1 and 3.4.1, both the UN and the World Bank were dissatisfied with the orthodoxy of slum upgrading and site and services. However deriving from the Marxist critique of the slum upgrading and site and services orthodoxy which perceived the state and market as mutually reinforcing instruments for the exploitation of the poor or in this case civil society, by the elites, policy reforms were necessitated to cure the challenge of state failure in the delivery of housing. Smith (1999) notes the Marxists‘ proposed cure to this challenge, in spite of a lack of evidence of its efficacy, to be the ―elimination of the market‖ in order to dissolve the ―penetration of civil society by the market‖ (Smith, 1999: 36-37) and the expansion of socialism. On the basis of the foregoing

and deriving from the deployment of three analytical perspectives – namely, the ―empirical‖, referring to the pre-existing conditions, the ―normative‖ referring to the proposed cure, and the ―policy‖ referring to the mechanics of reform – two additional trajectories emerge.

Firstly, the ―third sector‖ approach privileged a civil society- orientation, proposing policies that diffuse civil society and empower the emergent interlocutors such as NGOs and

66 other non-state actors. This empowerment was intended to facilitate local solutions to be developed by these interlocutors and was characterised as ―enabling‖. This was the

conceptual approach adopted by the UN which underpinned its community orientation and initially discounted the role of markets. Wils and Helmsing (2001:9) note that this community perspective underpinned the UN‘s derivative Community Development Programme (CDP), clearly articulating the elements of community participation and management to be central to the intervention.

Secondly, the World Bank adopted the neo-liberal trajectory that conceived the empirical perspective of society to be over-regulating markets leading to constraints of market supply to civil society and inequitable redistribution from the state directly to civil society. The normative perspective envisaged minimum regulation of the markets enabling improvements of market supply to civil society and the establishment of safety nets for those incapable of market participation. Wils and Helmsing (2001) note how the two perspectives – community and markets – contradict each other thus:

Important areas of contact and potential conflict between CE and EM relate to the restructuring of public sector delivery of basic infrastructure and services…….. governments in many countries increasingly decentralise the creation and management of basic infrastructure and services to markets in order to achieve more efficient and more demand-driven service delivery and to stimulate private sector growth………….As governments decentralise more to markets, the domain for community management of basic infrastructure and services may actually shrink and the relationships between communities and governments may undergo important changes. For example, policies and proposals for community management of basic services put forward with the aim to replace inadequate public sector delivery, may now have to compete with proposals for private sector based delivery. If and when governments in particular countries have decentralised responsibilities for service delivery to the private sector and by-passed, for good or bad reasons, communities to organise delivery themselves, these communities would need to develop new strategies towards governments to ensure their access to the new private sector based services. In such a context, communities would also need to develop new responses towards the new private sector service providers. (Wils and Helmsing, 2001:12-13)

However, it is acknowledged that the relationship between communities and markets are not always ―clear and straightforward‖ (Wils and Helmsing, 2001: 13) pointing to an ambiguous

pattern of instances of positive and negative relations between pursuits privileging markets and communities. Annex 3b presents the schematic representation developed by Smith of the conceptual differences

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3.6Methodological Differences: Unilinear Dogma versus Deductive Hegemony

The UN‘s methodological approach to the enabling housing principles was

conceptually formulaic in its insistence on the development of National Shelter Strategies. This approach is systematic and unilinear, detailing specific steps to be taken towards the development of National Shelter Strategies. The prominence given to these methodical steps was reflected in project reviews the UN conducted on countries that utilised their assistance for housing sector reforms such as Barbados, Kenya, Jamaica and Zimbabwe where the analysis focused on compliance with the methodological approach (UNCHS, 1990b). As a result, processes appeared more important than theories which were rarely recognised, let alone tested, in UN approaches.

The World Bank, on the other hand, had a different but similarly dogmatic methodological approach in its perspective of the enabling principles. The World Bank‘s conservative ideology inevitably fixed the conceptual instruments of the enabling principles to elements of privatisation, commercialisation, deregulation and decentralisation within a framework that privileged market relations. McAuslan‘s (1997) account of the Urban

Management Programme (UMP), a joint initiative of the World Bank and the UN from 1986 exemplifies this deductive approach by the World Bank. The UMP highlighted the strategic role of cities in developing countries and aimed to empower them, with the support of donors and other stakeholders, to inculcate sustainable management practices (Mabogunje, 2005). The deductive approach privileged land registration and this subsequently featured in the advice on land management, without regard to the merit of findings from field research; the particular emphasis in the World Bank‘s contribution to the land component was, however land registration and information with little work being commissioned from, as opposed to about,

developing countries. This was a characteristic of the World Bank‘s approach to the UMP: developing countries were to be recipients of policy advice, not co-contributors (McAuslan, 1997: 1709).

A similar experience of disregard for the merits of field research unfolded in South Africa‘s post-Apartheid formulation of a policy on municipal infrastructure that the World Bank

68 participated in (Tomlinson, 2002). In this case, the World Bank prepared the entire municipal infrastructure policy paper on the basis of a pre-conceived framework, or ―model‖

(Tomlinson, 2002: 381), that was not responsive to the local context44. Although the World Bank‘s housing policy advice was supported by theoretical constructs, it is arguable that these constructs were highly influenced by policy trajectories of Western countries. Such

theoretical constructs were developed by a small circle of Bank staff and consultants from consulting firms based in Washington such as Abt Associates and PADCO, as well as from ideologically conservative economists in leading economics departments of universities in the USA (Pugh, 1997a; 1997b). Thus, irrespective of the contexts, the World Bank approach favoured a deductive approach with a homogenous view of the housing sector. For example, (as noted earlier) in the land sub-component of housing, the Bank proffered land titling as the key to increasing land supply. On the other hand, the Bank was critical of other tools such as land use planning and cadastral developments. McAuslan (1997) notes that in the UMP, the World Bank-appointed team leader abhorred land use planning, an abhorrence that McAuslan notes also reflected in the World Bank team‘s collective frustrations with the UN team

because of the latter‘s focus on land use planning in the UMP. It was felt that this focus was delaying the overall programme of the UMP and Washington did not want planning to be the central message of the UMP (McAuslan, 1997: 1709).

The antipathy of the Bank …… towards land-use planning acted as a de facto veto on any publication within the UMP of any of the UNCHS-produced background papers on the subject.‖ (McAuslan, 1997:1710)

The antipathy to land-use planning derived from the perception of existing zoning regulations as costly and unrealistic, which fuelled informal and illegal developments (Mayo et al, 1986: 200). Zoning regulations could lead to rent seeking and corruption if the infrastructure for

44 _{The World Bank‘s approach to deductive policy advice evolved in the 1990s leading to its‘ rebranding as the} ―Knowledge‖ Bank. Researchers point to the 1998 World Development Report which was aptly titled

―Knowledge for Development‖ as the turning point in this approach. This new turn led to the establishment of the Global Development Network (GDN) which serves as the platform generating the substantial volume of research that has been supported by the World Bank since then (Stiglitz, 1999; Stone, 2001).

69 enforcement was weak (Deininger & Binswanger, 1999: 263), as it usually was in developing countries. Whereas the World Bank objected to existing zoning regulations because of its potential to restrain housing developments and its related capacity to create artificial land shortages, it acknowledged the utility of zoning to protect ecologically sensitive areas (World Bank, 1993: 33). In terms of housing development, the World Bank privileged the private sector over all other agents. Similarly, improving nascent local building materials industry was rarely promoted whereas price deregulation regimes created by trade liberalisation policies ensured increased building material imports, mostly from western markets. The developmental aspects of local industrialisation plans had been cast aside in the new neoliberal policies.