Decentralization can be structured in ways that make it more effective and beneficial for the poor.
Ensuring Democratic Accountability
The best way to ensure that decision-makers are accountable to local people and decision-making reflects the interests of local people is to vest powers in elected authorities who are chosen through competitive local elections (Crook and Sverrisson 2001:50). While it is often difficult to rein in the political forces that stifle open elections, the benefits can be substantial. For example, competitive local elections in West Bengal, India helped make policy more responsive to the poor, and in Colombia, competitively elected mayors— challengers to the dominant party politics—brought about better education, roads, and water supply (Crook and Sverrisson 2001:15-16, 42).
Special Measures Promoting the Interests of the Poor
A central government can increase the chances of pro-poor decentralization by making an explicit commitment to promote the interests of the poor at the local level and to ensure that marginal groups get a voice in public decisions (Ribot 2004:41). Elected local governments tend to have a poor record of serving the interests of women, the poor, and other marginalized populations unless required to do so by the central government (Crook and Sverrisson 2001 in Ribot and Larson 2004: 6). Special measures are needed to ensure that decentralization benefits the poorest people and most vulnerable groups— women, indigenous people, the landless, migrants, and minority castes. In 1978, for example, the government of West Bengal specifically sought to increase the power of poor and landless peasants by devolving implementation of government programs to the village councils, and mobilizing poor peasants to participate. As a result, 44 percent of those on village councils in Birbhum District are now small farm owners, sharecroppers, or agricultural laborers, and the benefits of government development programs are increasingly going to the poorer members of the community (Crook and Sverrisson 2001:15-16). Kerala State’s approach in 1996 was to give 35-40 percent of the state budget to local governance bodies for development planning, with detailed guidelines to make planning processes both participatory and equitable (Mukhopadhyay 2003:56).
Compensating the Poor for Short-Term Costs
Local institutions can find ways to compensate the poor for any rights they lose when a new management scheme restricts their access to a forest or other resource. For example, the community of San Antonio, Mexico, asked residents to forego cutting pine trees for use as roofing shingles so that they could be harvested as lumber. In return, the local logging business supplied free tin roofing materials and lumber to residents (Shyamsundar et al. 2004:96).
Community-Based Natural Resource Management
One specific approach to pro-poor decentralization of environmental resources is community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). Central governments in many parts of the developing world have begun to shift toward CBNRM in recognition of the limitations of centralized management and in response to the legitimate claims of indigenous groups and local communities to a share in the benefits of local resources. Worldwide, some 380 million hectares of forest land are now owned by or reserved for local communities—over half having been legally transferred to local control within the last 15 years (White and Martin 2002:11). This transformation in forest ownership and management began in Latin America in the late 1970s, moved through Africa in the late 1990s, and spread more recently to Asia. (See Box 3.2 How Community-Based Resource Management Can Benefit The Poor.)
