Why a Top-Down Approach to Development Projects will Always Fail

By Jesse Szeto 

Hubris.

That is why there are over 900 kilometres of fibre optic cable laid in rural Wisconsin—one of the Midwestern states of the United States— remain mostly dark while many rural residents still lack access to broadband internet.  Laid at a cost of USD 32.3 million with support from the federal and state governments, this project was meant to connect Wisconsin’s rural areas to high-speed internet. Yet more than a decade after construction was completed, one-third of rural households lack access.

That is also the reason why less than 20% of USD 80.1 million that had been given to the California state government to strengthen public health responses to bioterrorism had been spent, while at the same time, the project did manage to purchase Segway personal transporters that were wholly inadequate and inappropriate for navigating the freeway systems of the Golden State during an emergency.   

What ties both examples together is the fact that the organisation that was implementing the project failed to consult or work with the affected communities in a meaningful way.  Like many development efforts — whether led by donor agencies or government bodies from outside the community, these projects were funded, planned, and implemented from a top-down perspective, where outsiders arrived with ready-made plans and good intentions to make life better for a particular target group.  This approach often overlooks what truly matters to the target group—whether it be the rural residents in Wisconsin or IT workers in Silicon Valley.

The failure to meaningfully engage affected communities is not confined to wealthy nations—it is a universal feature of top-down development efforts. In Sri Lanka, this pattern was evident in both the Urban Regeneration Project, implemented by the Urban Development Authority, and its predecessor, the Sahaspura high-rise relocation scheme in Colombo. In both cases, the residents who were relocated were often the last to be informed that they were to be part of the scheme, and their experience of the relocation is not unlike a forced relocation, sometimes even implemented by soldiers, that is done for the benefit of people other than themselves.  This can be seen in a number of studies that have interviewed the relocated residents as well as the subsequent abandonment of the new high-rise residences by a large number of ‘beneficiaries’ who “voted with their feet.”

 While international development projects have for the last 50 years been often governed by what is called a logical framework approach that tied the goals, objectives, outputs, and activities of a project together in a logical way, that logic too often broke down when the plans devised in the offices of a government agency across town or in another country failed to account for its own biases and the realities  of the actual communities where the project was to be implemented. 

 In the case of Wisconsin, rural communities and the local internet providers that served them were left out of the planning for the broadband expansion project.  Instead of encouraging these providers to access the newly-laid fibre optic cable, the project planners inadvertently created barriers that made participation costly and cumbersome.  With little say in the project and having received little benefit, the rural communities had little reason to support the project when the large telecom companies lobbied the state legislature to effectively shut down the use of the new network for fear of losing their ability to charge monopoly pricing. The result:  almost a thousand kilometres of publicly funded fibre that remain dark to this day.    

 In the case of California, the first year of the bioterrorism preparedness project was marked by a complete lack of input from the local public health departments – the very agencies the project was meant to support. As a result, while they received a list of activities to implement and milestones to achieve for a project that was ostensibly to help them, none of them had had any input in deciding what those activities or milestones would be.  Should we be surprised that they were less than enthusiastic about adding these to their priorities for the year, or that the implementors spent money on equipment like Segways that no one had requested or needed? 

 In the case of the Sahaspura relocation project and the Urban Regeneration Project, the latter replicated the mistakes of the former by failing to consider the economic and social needs of the residents.  In some cases, the commute time to their jobs increased threefold while also tearing families away from the social networks that had enabled families and communities to look after their own.  The results, unsurprisingly, even had some residents returning to the very same Watte from which they had been relocated.     

 Top-down approaches lead to waste, inefficiencies, and resentment.  The only remedy is meaningful consultation: ask communities what they need, and design projects accordingly. After all, what is the point of “improving” a community or someone’s life if what you are giving them is not at all what they want? 

 The last three decades have seen the logical framework approach changed from being the top-down control and reporting instrument of faraway bureaucrats with no roots to the community to becoming a springboard for identifying and consulting all the stakeholders in a community to provide their insights and wisdom to make a project responsive and truly useful to them. But the transformation to this participatory approach is far from complete. 

 It is our responsibility whether as funding agencies, implementing organisations, government partners, and community members to be wary of anyone who purports to have a project that will solve an XYZ problem when the community and the citizens most affected have not been involved in any of the planning and consultation of the project.  At the end of the day, a project should not be something that is done to a community – it should be something shaped and decided by that community. 

This requires institutional and individual discipline to recognise that those closest to a problem often have the deepest insights into its solutions—and that development efforts are most effective when they are shaped by the lived experience of the communities they intend to serve. In other words, it helps to have humility.