Bhutan

Local Governance Systems and Capacity Strengthened with Increased Participation of women

For Bhutan, decentralization and local governance is an integral part of the democratization processes within the 10^th Five Year Plan (FYP) with the twin purposes of empowering people and ensuring balanced, equitable and sustainable socio-economic development by the Royal Government.

The priority accorded by the Royal Government to decentralisation and local governance sector has led development partners to come up with the first flagship joint sector programme called the Local Governance Support Programme (LGSP). (The LGSP coincides with the government's 10^th FYP period, July 2008- June 2013).

The joint programme with development partners have agreed to coordinate and harmonise support the national 10^th FYP target of poverty reduction to 15 % by 2013 from 23 %.

The two broad areas of intervention are in:

1.       Capacity development of national and local governments;

2.       Provision of Capital Annual Grants to the gewogs (blocks), which allows for better and predictable development programming, thereby facilitating more responsive, realistic and meaningful planning and budgeting exercises.

The LGSP aims to contribute towards improved service delivery for poverty reduction and realization of the MDGs, through its five strategic outputs including development of innovative products and mechanisms to address the challenges of local development.

Learning and innovative component of LGSP:

Under the LGSP two innovative products have been designed and tested. The Community Contract Protocol and the Small Scale Infrastructure Design and Costing Templates for the local levels at the district and blocks to be utilised by the communities for their local development planning and implementation.

These two products the protocol and templates has been developed to provide local governments  with the crucial tools necessary for local development viz;

1. Communities are confronted with challenges in getting labour to implement the development activities because of their remoteness and lack of skilled labour. The protocol has been successful in formalising the traditional and informal community agreements for procurement of labour in a non monetised manner.
2. The templates consist of the design and costing of the most common small infrastructure that local governments implement like the farm roads, irrigation channels so that local governments can address their limitations in skill and knowledge in the planning, design, costing and implementation of the small infrastructure in the communities.

The learning and innovation component of the LGSP has been  a gradual process starting from identifying the gaps and challenges that the local levels are confronted with on a regulary basis to implement their development activities annually.

This innovative approach for local bodies addresses;

• The capacity of the local government officials to address their technical capacity in planning costing, and design of their activities
• Technical capacity limitations to do a realistic planning of their technical needs and keep the activities within the budgets allocated. This has often resulted in the local governments inability to implement their development acitivities on time. Thereby the budgets are not utilised on time and has had to be refunded to the government at the end of the fiscal year.
• This supports the district engineers to be more effective and attentive to their supervisory and monitoring roles to the local governments rather than implementation focused.
• The protocol has enable local governments to do their own procurement in an effective and efficient manner that is well aligned to the governments procurement rules and regulations.
• The protocol enables the communities to explore for local means and flexibilities so that the procurement is done in a proper manner aligned to the rules and above all implement the activities in a timely manner.
•  Both the protocol and the templates approach has been designed keeping in mind the needs of the local level communities and their challenges in capacity with technical skills in planning, costing, design and procurement which is often missed out at the central level plans and policies.

The protocol has been tested in one block under Wangduephodrang district,  with the rehabilitation of a farm road and has been found successfully implemented. The Royal Government now plans under the LGSP to upscale the use of the protocol in other districts and blocks alongside the templates.

Similarly the templates are being tested in one district with the local officials being trained on how to use them and will be upscaled accordingly in consultation with the district engineers and other technical staff.