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COPYRIGHT 2007 The Institute Inc.
Introduction
Within the past decade or so, international financial institutions (IFIs) and other agencies backing major development interventions in East Asia have determined that social scientists familiar with local realities ought to be consulted when designing projects, especially to help mitigate popular resistance or similar threats to project "success." But what should the role of social scientists be in this process? How should we structure our involvement as the interlocutors between institutional bureaucracy on the one hand, and the actual concerns of project-affected people on the other? The IFIs seem to suggest that if we stick to their social policy framework and guidelines, everything will be just fine for all parties involved.
Yet despite being championed as universally applicable, many of the technical tools for analyzing the social ramifications of economic development initiatives are wrought with political and cultural biases that can significantly affect the efficacy of their implementation. In this paper, we argue that social assessment (SA) is often enmeshed within a politically oriented (neoliberal) development paradigm, and is thus unqualified for automatic designation as a "best practice tool." If it is to be applied, the SA (and any other social development tool) must be adjusted to fit local contexts, addressing certain specifically defined aims.
[NOTE: Given the authors' contractual pledges to the World Bank for confidentiality, the discussion below is fleshed out with less than the usual degree of ethnographic description than the authors would have preferred. The reader's forbearance is requested.]
The Social Assessment
What is social assessment? There are numerous takes on this. Some definitions, such as the definition given in the INTERNATIONAL PRINCIPLES FOR SOCIAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT (1) (Vanclay 2003), assert an underlying rationale:
Social impact assessment includes the processes of analyzing, monitoring and managing the intended and unintended social consequences, both positive and negative, of planned interventions (policies, programs, plans, projects) and any social change processes invoked by those interventions. Its primary purpose is to bring about a more sustainable and equitable biophysical and human environment.
Adopting this definition, the principle function of SA can be understood as a means of (or a tool for) anticipating potential social effects of development interventions.
To ensure a baseline standard of project quality, THE WORLD BANK SOCIAL ASSESSMENT HANDBOOK (a good example of "state of the art" international SA implementation practices) instructs consultants to analyze five specific areas, referred to as "entry points":
1. Institutional Analysis: How will different social institutions, from clan units to civil society organizations to local governments, be affected by the project? How will their interests be undermined or served? How may they potentially respond to project implementation?
2. Stakeholder Analysis: What is the relationship of different groups of people to the project? What reasons might groups have to support or oppose the project? Who are the project affected-peoples (PAPs), the intended targets, or beneficiaries, of the projects' social development measures? Stakeholder analysis appears to be a common-sense endeavor, but, in practice, it can be both complicated and contentious. Many projects have specific intended beneficiaries, but stakeholders also include those indirectly affected by the project (though such groups are not always recognized or identified during the planning phase). For instance, if a microcredit program is designed to create viable economic actors, what are the effects on, and reactions by, their competition?
3. Participation Framework: Through what channels can stakeholders affect project design and implementation? How will consultations be conducted and with whom? What employment opportunities will be generated by project implementation? Analysis of the participation framework examines how people are to be involved in the project, from aspects of data-gathering and analysis to project design to sources of labor and management during the implementation phase and even to evaluation. The participation framework guides the entire project: its processes, timeframes, and budget.
4. Social Diversity and Gender Analysis: Have all social groups been included in project design? How are different social groups, especially targeted beneficiaries, being taken into account? Are women actively engaged as participants in project design and implementation? And are all generations represented appropriately?
5. Social Risks and Vulnerability: What are the social risks of project implementation? How might people be hurt by the project? What tensions may the project create? There are manifold ways project implementation causes social risks; e.g., neighboring communities may become jealous of target beneficiary groups, or inhabitants of areas where PAPs are being resettled may perceive the influx as an ethnic invasion.
The embrace of social assessment is also allied with the emergence of "Community Driven Development" (CDD), a locally based development paradigm popularized by the World Bank in which planning is driven by community decisions. CDD aims at community empowerment by engaging community members to fine-tune project design via processes through which they select project "options" at the village or local level, typically from a menu, such as a road going this way rather than that, or a health clinic rather than a road. A thoroughgoing SA is seen as more critical for the success of CDD initiatives than for average projects. As such, conflict over social assessment is especially prevalent during the preparation of CDD projects.
We include these descriptions of SA, CDD, and the World Bank implementation guidelines in order to demonstrate how IFIs' social policy procedures are seen by their practitioners as serving good purposes. Such safeguard procedures are meant to ensure that local actors and vulnerable groups are accounted for (and even engaged with) during project design and implementation and to guide planners in designing a project ideally fit with local conditions and cultures. Yet in practice, even projects with the best-prepared SAs meet with local resistance and can have significant socially detrimental impacts. As we see it, this occurs because the functionality of the SA protocols is dependent on the political context in which they are applied. When local political contexts do not accord with those for which the SA was designed (namely, contexts oriented toward participatory democracy), the implementation process tends to face contestation from various power holders, which in turn affects the participation and inputs of local community members. To illustrate this point, we examine the story of social assessment in the Chinese context, where despite official acceptance of the social development paradigm, political resistance from local-level power holders continues to hinder its application.
Social Assessment In The Chinese Context
The history of SA implementation in China has two versions; we will present both. In its official rendition, initial suspicions of SA by Chinese project officers were put to rest by top-level officials and SA practices were embraced throughout the country. This story is significant because it situates China among other "progressive" nations conforming to international standards for social protection. It also downplays the political controversy that surrounded the arrival of SA and other social development practices.
In the second telling, we focus on how local-level resistance to SA implementation continued despite its...
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