Advancing intersectoral initiatives (Part I)

BEFORE I start with this week’s column, I would just like to express my appreciation for all the people who took the time to respond to last week’s edition.  While a few people thought that I may have been a bit too candid with the personal revelations in the content, the majority of  reactions were overwhelmingly positive. As this column evolves over time, I get a chance to see how some of my ideas evolve internally, and whether they eventually – incidentally or otherwise – sync with public policy in any particular area.
This week, I want to deal with  the synergy, or lack thereof, which exists among government agencies.  As it is now, while I understand that top-level coordination of the business of government exists at least in principle, the principal forum being of course weekly Cabinet meetings.  There are also the cabinet sub-committees which further facilitate cohesion among state agencies. But outside of this, and as always I admit that I may be subject to correction, I don’t get the sense that there is a systematic, strategic and clearly defined policy of management synergy that is actively applied to governance in Guyana.
I guess the question could be asked, why the need for such a degree of enhanced cohesion?  At a fundamental level, the objectives I have in mind are: greater knowledge sharing across the public service; more efficient negotiations, distribution and use of donor resources; and more strategic deployment of state resources through greater cooperation between ministries and semiautonomous agencies.

Strategic Deployment of State Resources
Now, there are several avenues from which we can approach this. One solution I want to focus on is how policy formulation and execution thematically, with governmental sectors forming basic thematic areas, with various agencies and/or ministries forming the unit components.  For example, let’s consider the human services sector – this would include, naturally, the Ministry of Labour, Human Services and Social Security, as well as the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs, and the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport.  I can’t conceive of any comprehensive programme that can be formulated from any one of those ministries that would not benefit from at a very minimum basic input from the others.
The Economic Services Sector?  We have the Ministries of Finance, Foreign Affairs, Trade and Tourism, the newly formed Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment, along with the state agency, GO-Invest.   I should add that such a system, as I conceive of it, does not of course exclude intersect among sectors.
As an adjunct to this approach, I want to suggest a new approach to the composition, selection and function of state boards.  As someone who functions on several state boards, I see some validity in the argument that a refinement of board membership whereby one board could function over several entities is entirely possible.
With the sort of proactive board orientation and technical support that I’ve suggested in previous articles, we could easily see, for example, one board coordinating policy of several agricultural sector entities, or – to cite another example – one board that coordinates the work of several related agencies, or agencies/programmes whose work programme intersect in some way, like the President’s Youth Award (Culture, Youth and Sport) and the Child Care and Protection Agency (Human Services).
And to make this effect of course (and to avoid the issue of territoriality I’ll discuss further down), I’d suggest rotating specialist boards within specific sectors.  Among the positives for such an arrangement would be the establishment of a monitoring mechanism as an integral component of greater synergy, a topic I will delve into further.

Intersectoral Donor Fund Negotiation
As I’ve touched upon before (and as someone involved in the management of donor community funding, I admit I have a certain bias) there is tremendous benefit in building a strategic donor-negotiation machinery.  If we are to presume such a machinery working in concert with that outlined above, I think the payoff would be incalculable.
Donor community support for national projects in terms of dollars invested, is skewed towards certain sectors, with public infrastructure and health I believe receiving the lion’s share – HIV/AIDS funding for example constitutes more than the funding available for many other health care areas put together.  I believe that it is in our best interest for us to use a synergistic approach to negotiating donor funding so that the money is spread more evenly across as many sectors as possible.  If the deliverables of a health grant, for example, can be conceived in terms of necessitating public education and behaviour change, money from that grant can be channelled to other Human Service Sector entities; I don’t see a donor agency refusing.  The key objective is to plan a value for money strategy, one in which every donor dollar touches as many sectors as possible, despite the initial sector of focus or main executing ministry.  HIV/AIDS funding for example would be engineered, even as the Ministry of Health is in charge of deliverables, to touch substantially upon the education, culture, labour and whatever else falls under the aegis of human services.
I know that there has been the complaint that donor agencies often impose their own developmental blueprints with conditionalities that may not necessarily sync with the needs of the recipient – indeed, I would know because that is a complaint I’ve made myself; but, that said, particularly in the current global economic climate, and presuming that we have used decades of donor community engagement to build our project formulation and negotiation capacity, I think that now is the time to come up with our innovative initiatives that serve the dual purpose of efficiently managing developmental aid while appealing to the donor community’s newfound sense of financial prudence.
All the money that will necessarily be involved in such a system notwithstanding, the key currency, the key capital, in all this is going to be information: how data is mined to access it; how it is shared across sectors of both government as well as the wider stakeholder community; how efficiently it moves between points of communication.

Challenges
There are of course several hurdles foreseeable in establishing such synergy.  Technology, for example, has been a conceivable, in particular the information and communication technology infrastructure that would be necessary for the real-time processing, storage and retrieval necessary for such a system.  We’ve seen at least the groundwork being laid for such infrastructure with the government e-governance initiative designed to provide dedicated bandwidth to government agencies, along with what seems to be a parallel agency-specific initiative by Guyana Power and Light.  But even these come with corollary concerns, such as long-term cost-benefit feasibility and the very clear and present issue of a stable power supply on the national grid.
However, in my belief, greater than the sum of all of those combined is the issue of territoriality.  Work long enough in the public sector in Guyana – and I’m not arguing that this does not obtain elsewhere, from Trinidad to the United States – and you’re going to come across some people who believe that they don’t occupy public service posts as much as they’re in charge of their own little fiefdoms, over which they are Lord and Master, or Lady and Mistress, as if often the case.   And when that happens, getting information from these people is, as the expression goes, like to trying to pull teeth.

Conclusion
As with many problems facing our society, the solution herein lies not so much with enhancing technical efficiency but in substantially transforming the culture of the bureaucracy from where that bureaucracy exists simply to sustain it separate parts, to one where a coherent and holistic sense of service delivery is what drives it.  Which brings us back full circle to the development of a system where cross-sectoral synergy is the status quo, the standard way in which things are done, where information flows securely but freely along channels among relevant ministries, semiautonomous agencies, parliament and even civil society.
It is illustrative of at least an initial nod in this direction that last week, President Donald Ramotar held what appeared to be from all accounts a successful government/civil society forum at the Office of the President.  What I would love to see in the upcoming months is the precise movement towards consensus, information sharing and functional cooperation (or, in a word, synergy) among all the decision-makers of this society.   Finally, in closing, while this initial article constitutes a slight refining of what I would consider random thoughts on this topic, I intend to interrogate this area more substantially in two more instalments.

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