On June 12th, 2009, the same day that Iran had its contentious presidential elections, Moroccans also went out to polls to participate in local elections. In stark contrast, Morocco’s elections were viewed to be both free and fair, and boasted a 15 percent increase in turnout from the 2007 parliamentary elections.

While much of the world’s focus has not been on Morocco’s new party and efforts for reform, the Authenticity and Modernity party (PAM) gained the most seats in local councils (3 percent more than the ruling Socialists). PAM’s ‘third way’ message of promoting tradition and progress, business and social justice, and development and the environment energized a grassroots movement rarely seen in Moroccan politics.

PAM now has the potential to considerably guide and execute the large-scale and profoundly significant Moroccan decentralization initiative to enable local communities and provinces to have a greater say in their own affairs. The “roadmap” to decentralization, which describes the project’s guiding framework, objectives, and actions, was announced by Morocco’s King Mohammed VI on November 6, 2008--the 33rd anniversary of the Green March which saw 350,000 unarmed Moroccans cross into the Western Sahara to unite (or reunite) the region with the Kingdom.

The idea of decentralization in Morocco was first promoted in 1977 by the late King Hassan II. In 2007, the Kingdom proposed to the United Nations Security Council a solution to the Western Sahara--“autonomy within Moroccan sovereignty,” which necessarily involves significant transfer of authority from the central level. The proposal catalyzed today’s new decentralization effort throughout Morocco with the Western Sahara.

The strategic implementation of the roadmap, including a funding level of 10 billion dollars over 10 years, can generate transformative socio-economic and environmental benefits for the entire population (36 plus million people). It can also establish ideal conditions to resolve the Western Saharan conflict by advancing the political, social, cultural, economic, and environmental fulfillment of the people there, especially those who have suffered most over the course of the international conflict.

The roadmap includes both “devolution” and “deconcentration” organizational arrangements, which are to be carried out by the “democratic, participatory method.” The participatory development method values local knowledge and engages entire communities in dialogue as they conduct their own investigation and analysis toward the creation of an action plan that reflects local development priorities.

The King’s roadmap has developmental responsibilities (legal, financial, and operational) existing at the sub-national level (among local communities, civil and private groups, and local and regional government). A range of essential capabilities (to overcome constraints and realize opportunities) need to be built among these local groups through training, education, and experience. The roadmap intends to strike a balance between national and regional levels, with clear and recognized roles for each.

Civil organizations play a critical role in decentralized systems and sustaining local projects and are part of partnerships at and between the micro and macro levels of society. Decentralization can then actually strengthen national solidarity in Morocco due to the web of new participatory-based partnerships that are created. Local communities generally seek to maintain these kinds of partnerships because they help satisfy their human needs and better enable people to shape the institutions that govern them.

The roadmap is flexible enough so that the system of decentralization can appropriately grow out of the processes of each village and neighborhood implementing development projects (such as, in rural areas, clean water, fruit tree agriculture, and irrigation). Successful local development is often replicated by neighboring communities who may embark on a process of their own and work with others to pursue shared goals. This is generally how scaling-up occurs and new and reformed policies take shape.

Decentralized development in this form could demonstrate to the 400,000 people in the Western Sahara a relationship with the Kingdom that furthers their self-determined local and regional human development goals. This is how decentralization could be a path of common interest.

To advance decentralization, centers at universities (Western Sahara needs its first university) ought to be created that train facilitators of participatory methods. The methods are interactive, information-gathering activities that help local people evaluate their conditions and plan priority projects. Facilitators of planning activities can be extension workers from ministries (such as from agriculture and health), local and regional politicians, teachers, students, from civil organizations, retirees, and citizens.

The new training center at Hassan II University in Mohammedia, for example, which is in partnership with the High Atlas Foundation, is planning training programs with presidents of communes and national park technicians who are then able to more effectively assist development initiatives in the areas they work. These professional positions and others interface with local communities and they could therefore organize and facilitate participatory community planning meetings to advance decentralized development.

In order to assist decentralization, Morocco’s Ministry of Interior (which is in charge of internal security) ought to develop its role as a provider of information to advance development. For example, it could help build institutional partnerships by making available online relevant information related to the tens of thousands of Moroccan civil society organizations. The functions of traditional provincial and local Interior officials should also be reformed so that they are active contributors to development and trust is built. For example, it might be helpful if the positions of "Kaid," "Sheikh," and "Moqadam" were made directly accountable to presidents of communes.

Finally, a new decentralization project office within the Royal Cabinet would help build innovative partnerships between government, civil, and private institutions, and influence against the centralized tendencies of government. PAM, being a new party and with its concentration of power at the local level, is probably pre-disposed to work against rigid centralized control of development.

Creating regionalization by way of implementing locally determined and controlled projects that benefit in important ways every person in a rural area will cost approximately 4 billion dollars. This figure is projected from project experience since the mid-1990s in the Rural Commune of Toubkal (Province of Taroudant) with a population of 10,000 people. Project costs are kept low because they use local materials and know-how, and labor is often contributed in-kind.

Therefore, the cost of this approach to decentralization in all rural and urban areas, with more heavy funding for projects in the Western Sahara, as the King of Morocco proposed, would likely be in the range of 10 billion dollars over 10 years. Morocco’s bold initiative is worth the investment, considering the enormous human development that would ensue, the most probable end to the decades-long Western Saharan conflict, and with that, greater constructive relationships among North African nations.

Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is a sociologist and is president of the High Atlas Foundation, a non-governmental organization founded by former Peace Corps volunteers and dedicated to community development in Morocco.

Depending on how and for what international aid is administered in Pakistan, the hearts and minds of its people, and which of the opposing forces they collaborate with, hang in the balance. Recent polls indicate that the majority of Pakistanis consider economic and political conditions of greater priority than terrorism, suggesting a real opportunity to gain control over the global threat that the Pakistani situation poses.

More than 2 million Pakistanis are displaced from their homes, most since early May. The insurgency had wrested control of the vast Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the Swat district, and the adjoining Buner district. It threatens the Punjab province--where most Pakistanis live and the nation’s nuclear weapons are located--and to control the seat of power in Islamabad.

On May 20, the United States pledged $110 million in emergency aid, and the administration wants Congress to approve $7.5 billion more over 5 years to stabilize the shaky Pakistani government. The international community also pledged $4 billion last month in Tokyo. Taliban and Al Quaeda havens are encouraged in environments with suppressed human development, and extremist groups also provide some basic support for desperate people and so gain their trust.

If the United States and international community, working with the Pakistani government to build the people’s governing capacities, can implement successful strategic development in Pakistan, the insurgency can be undermined, stability can take hold, and the people themselves will deny the return of the Taliban and Al Quaeda. Thus, the American special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, and his team are visiting the conflict region this week to evaluate not only how to meet the pressing needs of those displaced, but also the widely recognized (including by the Joint Chiefs of Staff) long-term solution for security--economic, political, and social development.

Military experts suggest that approximately 1 million troops are needed to stabilize a country of this size--a commitment only possible if a worst case scenario unfolds. Not since the Marshall Plan after World War II has the international community been absolutely obliged to get aid right, with global peace and untold human lives hanging in the balance.

Since 2001, the United States has spent $12 billion to help Pakistanis. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that overall these efforts were unsuccessful. Failure on this scale actually hurts the public’s perception of the United States and of their own government. In the current climate in Pakistan, the challenge to create successful development is far greater, and so the same international aid approaches will certainly result in the same miserable outcomes. The situation requires a rethinking of the entire aid approach, grounding it in lessons learned from past development experiences in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Before describing strategies to deliver aid, its overall intended goal should be stated: to engage members of Pakistan’s local villages and neighborhoods to implement their own development projects. Critical benefits follow from this. Economically, since local people typically know best the viable and culturally appropriate opportunities in their own surroundings, development projects they determine (versus those by government and international agencies) are more sustainable, and generate more jobs and better livelihoods. Politically, the process of local people together identifying and implementing projects is a participatory form of democracy and organizes a bottom-up people’s movement. Socially, local groups planning development, which necessarily involves sharing ideas and information, is in itself educational, and when aid is directed to support these processes, public trust is fostered toward the providers of aid, including government.

With the mayhem in Pakistan, what kinds of initiatives can further the goal of aid, where should they initially be targeted, and how can they be implemented? First, more than half of the 2 million plus refugees are registered with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. International aid should be available to ensure the U.N.’s registration program is fully funded, and that refugees are aware that the previously stated goal of aid will be vigorously pursued, initially targeting displaced communities (many from Swat), impoverished fringes of the Punjab province, and the Buner district, which connects to the Punjab.

Second, approximately 10 percent of the refugees are in camps along roads, such as south of Swat, where food distribution centers are too. Anger and conflict will only grow the longer people are in camps. As much as possible, organization of camps should be similar to that of the specific locales the refugees come from, so dialogue over new development projects can begin before they return to their communities. Local voices regarding productive local development must be awakened a soon as possible, which should also galvanize popular opinion supportive of moderation.

Third, the Provincial Reconstruction Team model used in Iraq and Afghanistan with some success can be improved on by training Pakistani teams (with respectful international assistance) to transfer skills in facilitating “participatory” development planning methods. These methods (using community members and leaders, government and civil representatives, school teachers and university students) help local community groups identify and prioritize development projects, and create a plan of action for their implementation. Teams also build partnerships by working to include relevant Pakistani government agencies in the local design processes of projects.

Finally, discussion should be accelerated with the Pakistani government on instituting measures that decentralize decision-making authority for development to district and local levels, such as simplifying the formation of civil and political groups, which in turn, can strengthen national sovereignty.

The local participatory approach to development is an alternative to the terribly wasteful and even harmful top-down approach to international aid used previously in Pakistan. With world peace increasingly at stake because of the Pakistani situation, bottom-up aid is the urgent alternative to the current approach. Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is a sociologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and president of the High Atlas Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advances community development in Morocco.

Considering the economic and political challenges facing the United States and the world today, and given the lessons learned in foreign assistance since it began after World War II with the Marshall Plan, now is the time that the Peace Corps should amend the role that its volunteers play in international development.

The Peace Corps, founded in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, currently supports almost 8,000 American volunteers who live with local communities in 74 emerging countries around the world, where they promote community development and international friendship.

In the current issue of WorldView magazine, a publication of the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA), President-elect Barack Obama states his support for doubling the number of volunteers to 16,000 by 2011.  He also recognizes great opportunities that might have been realized for the United States and other countries around the world had President Kennedy’s vision of a corps of 100,000 volunteers been fulfilled.  The NPCA recently spearheaded a campaign to double the Peace Corps’ size and move closer to Kennedy’s expansion goal.

Now is the moment to at least double the current number of Peace Corps volunteers.  Peace Corps can easily be part of the new economic stimulus package being fashioned to address America’s quickly rising unemployment.  Volunteers are U.S. federal government employees and receive a modest living stipend and health care coverage.

The spreading economic crisis is challenging the stability of developing nations and putting them in greater need of international assistance.  Volunteers serve among the most disadvantaged and vulnerable communities and contribute to the local economy as they live and work.

There is nearly universal agreement that the United States needs urgently to rebuild its image in the world.  Volunteers, as good neighbors and in their dedication to meeting human needs, contribute to public diplomacy and to goodwill among nations.

Foreign governments also understand, today more than ever, the promise of bottom-up development to decrease poverty, and the potential contribution volunteers can make to its processes.  But achieving this potential will remain elusive until the primary role of volunteers in development is transformed to what they are optimally suited to do: act as third-party facilitators to help organize inclusive community meetings, and apply participatory planning activities that help groups prioritize and implement socio-economic and environmental initiatives.

There has been a paradigm shift in the field of international development since the Peace Corps began.  By the 1990s, the vast majority of international and domestic, public and civil organizations dedicated to socio-economic development and improving the natural environment came to require the participation of local communities (the beneficiaries) in determining and managing projects.  Today globalization is also empowering localities with more information, better communication, and more control to promote the change they want to see.  The Peace Corps has shown to be a forerunner of this gradual shift toward community-driven development and away from top-down decision-making and control.

The global proliferation of bottom-up development strategies is due to their efficacy, including the sense of ownership local communities come to feel toward initiatives because they reflect their own interests, which in turn encourages project sustainability and the attainment of development goals. 
 
It is often perceived as ironic, however, that for new self-reliant development projects to be implemented, third-parties outside the benefitting communities are needed to spearhead local development planning meetings in rural villages and neighborhoods.  Outsiders do not have a personal vested interest in the community initiatives, other than to help ensure that they are inclusive of marginalized groups and they reflect the interests of the community as a whole.  For this reason, outside facilitators of community development are more often better positioned than local individuals, at least initially, to help work through conflicts and draw in government and civil groups to partner with communities to advance development.

Peace Corps volunteers are ideally positioned to fill this essential third-party role.  They are regularly assigned to host-government ministries to help advance social service plans related to health, education, natural resource management, and economic development.  Volunteers live in communities targeted to benefit from development, and therefore are natural links between government agencies and local communities.  Their overall mission to promote international understanding and their tenure of two years elicits trust, enabling them to catalyze participation in development.  Whether they are assigned to teach English or promote public health, help develop small businesses or agricultural opportunities, they are able to organize community meetings driven by what local people want.

Too often, the training of volunteers emphasizes the transference of technical skills, which many evaluations suggest they are ill-suited to deliver (usually due to limited prior professional experience) and are, moreover, likely to already exist in-country.  For example, farmers in developing countries hardly need to acquire skills related to animal husbandry, but they can utilize Peace Corps volunteers to bring together people to discuss their own challenges and opportunities, and create plans of action to achieve their own self-identified important goals.

The Peace Corps goals of cultural exchange and international development are most effectively achieved when volunteers are trained to elicit and respond to the deep interests of communities and community members’ own visions of change.   It is on this basis that President Kennedy’s and NPCA’s ideal expansion to 100,000 volunteers is well justified.

Yossef Ben-Meir is a former Peace Corps volunteer and program director in Morocco.  He is president of the High Atlas Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by former Peace Corps volunteers who served in Morocco and dedicated to community development in that country.

In recent weeks, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, this year’s Nobel Prize winner in economics Paul Krugman, and many political leaders have expressed support for a fiscal stimulus package in the face of the economic crisis.  The United States Government’s deliberate use of the fiscal tool to jump-start economic activity and growth and reverse decline is the legacy of the New Deal and President Franklin Roosevelt during the Depression, and is a key part of the Keynesian paradigm-shift in modern economics. 

To help get the country out of the current economic morass, Senator Barack Obama supports strategic public infrastructural investment, and using a “scalpel” on the federal budget for its precision in spending reduction.  On the other hand, Senator John McCain stated his desire for an across the board spending freeze - which is to apply a “hatchet” to the budget and implies that all forms of government spending is a culprit in continued economic downturn.

The question is, then: What kinds of programs, through increased federal funding, can result in expeditiously implemented public projects that generate dispersed benefits, increase employment, and push back against the alarming economic problems and fears becoming reality?  An answer is: Programs that incorporate community organizing and development because they catalyze sustained economic recovery.  This is when local people who live in proximity to each other create and benefit from development initiatives that they also together conceive.

Projects community groups pursue when given the opportunity reflect their varied interests, their local situation, and most pressing needs.  It may be establishing an irrigation canal, road, school, clinic, community center, or cooperative.  It can be, for example, a small business, a training center, pubic health initiative, planting trees, and youth and women’s programs.  It could involve manufacturing, agriculture, improving the environment, and innovative combinations of all of the above.

Public investment in locally-driven projects directly and most immediately impacts local populations and their organizations.  Jobs are created and income is generated at the local level as projects are implemented, which involves labor, materials, and action.  Local control, ownership, and benefits encourage the ongoing functioning of community projects.

Development management and other capacity areas of local people, government, and civil society are invested in with the idea that local groups work together and carry forward development and renewal.  Decision-making skills of individuals, groups, and institutions are improved through collaborative experiences, and risk is inherently shared.  The conditions for an increasingly diversified and adapting economy are put in place.
 
How can the federal government’s fiscal stimulus achieve locally-determined and managed infrastructure and human development?  First, consider that public infrastructure projects of this kind are determined during local participatory planning meetings, which local “facilitators” help organize.  AmeriCorps and other community volunteers, for example, are throughout the country and can be great facilitators of community dialogue and assessments of their opportunities.  University-community partnerships have university students working with communities, finding out their needs, and helping to implement projects to address them.  Local governments can identify viable development opportunities in their area for long-term, multi-sectoral growth.  A well-reformed White House faith-based initiative can also potentially be a greater catalyst for community-based public-good projects. 

In this approach to federal government’s fiscal-induced stimulus, two main areas need to be supported: 1) training university students, volunteers, and local citizens, including the retired, in community-wide planning approaches and organizing for development; and 2) implementing projects that local people and groups decide are most important to them and involve partnerships.  Economic stimulus in the form of community investments creates the short and long-term outcomes needed to help get people and the nation out of economic decline (with an immediate injection of money and new productive work) and onto a path of transformational bottom-up growth.  It also seems to be a warranted approach and pay-back to the people considering the stunning national cost of the bank bailouts.

Public infrastructure at the community level also gets people and families more heavily involved and contributive towards economic recovery.  When the stimulus is directly on their behalf and targets communities’ self-described priorities for development, it elicits people’s energy, ideas, and dedication - and helps the stimulus to succeed.

Yossef Ben-Meir has practiced and researched community development for 18 years and is currently president of the High Atlas Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to community development in Morocco.

The denigration of ‘community organizing’ by Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani at the Republican Convention could become a setback for their party if the American public came to understand the real lessons of community organizing about how to deal with recent world events.

For example, community organizers intrinsically know that successful reconstruction and reconciliation in Iraq and elsewhere require local community participation and control, and do not need years of billions of dollars wasted on foreign contractors and millions of lives made to suffer and so many die before it is finally implemented to some degree.

Community organizers would know that to rebuild after large scale humanitarian disasters like Hurricane Katrina, community meetings are needed to plan reconstruction (with displaced people, this requires innovative strategies) and that top-down management will stifle empowerment, ownership, and opportunities. 

Community organizers observe the impact of global events and trends on local communities and people, and therefore understand that an essential part of free trade agreements is new and significant support to address economically dislocated families (particularly in rural areas), diversify local economies, and training.

Community organizers would identify that the Palestinian people need a more self-reliant economy (which would also in the process build sovereignty) and not an economy that is excessively dependent on Israel’s to a point of debilitating Palestinian underdevelopment (e.g., on average 90 percent of total Palestinian imports and exports go to and from Israel).

Community organizers help to create solutions that satisfy multiple needs, and therefore would likely reform the White House faith-based initiative in the direction of Senator Barack Obama’s proposals for the program: broaden access to an increase in funds for community initiatives while reducing potential areas of government-religion impropriety.

Community organizers, who regularly hear people express diverse and heartfelt interests and beliefs, would be sympathetic to the Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden’s view of abortion: that it is a personal decision to a religious degree (including when a person believes life begins) and government should not make the decision for women.

Regarding Joe Biden and Iraq, community organizers would likely agree that a high degree of federalism - which Biden proposes and involves autonomy of provinces and regions to manage their own development and affairs and the central government playing a supportive role - is necessary for the country to remain whole and stable.

Community organizers, who help people work through the struggle to reach common ground and purpose, then sincerely appreciate that the unified feeling in the world after 911 was a unique moment that afforded the chance for a new course and make a leap in a critical area of human life.  Instead, the opportunity of a lifetime was squandered to fulfill a naive obsession with Iraq.

Community organizers know that public trust is generated in reaction to the empowerment people feel when their ideas for projects are implemented and the benefits are tangible; this may inform, at least in part, the approaches of community organizers to public diplomacy, the 'war of ideas', and addressing root causes of terrorism.   

Community organizers would herald the incredible contributions of the Peace Corps to nations of the world, especially to its own country, which has benefitted in untold ways by the more than 190,000 Americans who community organized in 139 nations since the Peace Corps began almost five decades ago by President John Kennedy. 

Community organizers know that their social purpose is 1) as inseparable to the United States as federalism, which is fused into its structure, 2) an historic mission carried forward in the 1800s by the Republican Party and later by projects inspired by the philosophers Alexis de Tocqueville and John Dewey, and 3) made contemporary in the 1960s because of urgent needs and fifty years later being implemented all over the world, by people in all disciplines, walks of life, and backgrounds due to the global explosion of civil society. 

Suggestions that community organizing is subversive Marxism and that it seeks a socialist revolution are preposterous and can be intended to rouse a cultural divide.  Community organizing is cross-ideological, including religions and political philosophies.  Conservatism supports community organizing because of the more adapting economic environment it creates and people taking responsibility; liberalism supports it because it advances democracy and justice. 

Community organizing is inclusive in its approach and often results into cross-sectoral partnerships that include government.  It seeks to reform society through an evolutionary process of improving social relationships, advancing socio-economic development, and a healthier natural environment.

While trying to suggest that community organizing is separate from the American ideal, Sarah Palin and Rudolph Guiliani may have distanced themselves and their party from the 'holy grail' repeatedly found in the fantastic story of the United States.  This was done by radicalizing and speaking down to a profession that makes real the quintessential American value of individual and community fulfillment within a democratic framework and a united and sovereign country.

Yossef Ben-Meir is a sociologist and has dedicated 17 years to the study and practice of community development.  He is President of the High Atlas Foundation www.highatlasfoundation.org, a nonprofit organization that promotes community development in Morocco.  He lives in New Mexico, USA.

 At the Republican National Convention, Rudolph Guiliani and then vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin disregarded and seemed to mock Barack Obama’s background as a community organizer.  Guiliani, a former Republican presidential candidate, went on to liken community organizing to something corrupt.  What is the function of a “community organizer” and how did their remarks undermine central tenets of the American experience and an essential operator for community development to occur?

 Community organizers help local groups develop action plans and implement local development.  Community organizers do not decide for others what their most pressing needs are, but rather facilitate dialogue as people together assess their challenges and opportunities and create socio-economic projects they want.  Community organizers are negotiators, conflict managers, and help build mutually beneficial and peaceful relationships. 

 The reality is that neighborhoods and villages of people generally do not spontaneously come together to improve their socio-economic conditions.  Catalysts are needed to jump-start the process and organize meetings.  Communities do not automatically work through conflicts that naturally arise when they together plan local development and consider the broad range of interests and ideas reflected among them.  Third party facilitators help to ensure an inclusive, partnership-building, and productive experience.  Community organizers perform these and other key functions until  development initiatives are self-sustaining and people are meeting their needs through their own capabilities (material, skills, and network).         

 Community organizing has a deep history in the United States.  Its first initiatives in urban areas in the late 1800s were inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville and John Dewey - philosophers who connected community development to the intrinsic identity of the country.  Contemporary community development grew significantly in the United States in the 1960s and its political roots are in decentralization and federalism - concepts embodied in the Constitution and that the Republican Party historically championed.

 So what kind of social policies come out of the community organizing perspective?  None that warrant its attack at the Republican National Convention.  For one, Senator Obama’s community organizing perspective had to have informed his recent proposals to reform the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives to broaden access to support while reducing unhealthy government-religion entanglements.  Community organizing redresses the dislocation of families in the United States and around the globe caused by free trade or other social and natural phenomenon.  People with community organizing backgrounds would likely intuitively know that for reconstruction and reconciliation in Iraq to endure, it needs to be locally-driven - a lesson finally applied by the United States after billions of dollars wasted and insecurity reigned in that country for years.  In fact, community organizing is about rallying people’s participation, which is needed to deal with the range of domestic and international issues facing the United States.  Most likely, the community organizing perspective of Senator Obama helped his presidential campaign put in place strategies that generated historic levels of grassroots support throughout the country for his election and enabled him to overcome significant odds to win the Democratic Primary.
  
 Barack Obama should take advantage of this political opportunity created by the ironic remarks of Republicans Governor Palin and Mayor Giuliani and explain how community organizing directly relates to successfully dealing with the serious challenges confronting the United States, including terrorism. Facilitators of and participants in well organized community development initiatives are empowered in such a way that diminishes feelings of alienation and the kind of discontent that can lead to violence. 

 The Obama campaign ought to make the case that community organizing is the right kind of experience needed at the highest level of decision-making. Non-ideological, pragmatic Republicans that support their party for the very reason it was founded - to better enable the people of states and communities to manage their own affairs - may see that their priorities are better served through the community organizing experience of Barack Obama.
 

Yossef Ben-Meir is a sociologist and president of the High Atlas Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by former Peace Corps volunteers and dedicated to community development in Morocco.  The views expressed in this article are his own.

          Community organizing means different things to different people, but its basic intention is to bring people together at the local level to talk about the socioeconomic and environmental challenges they face, work through their differences, and then implement their own plan of action to meet their most critical development goals.

          Facilitators of this process--such as the Democratic presidential nominee Illinois Senator Barack Obama, before he entered the political scene--are necessary to catalyze and help maintain a productive and inclusive experience for participating communities.  Senator Obama often refers to this approach to social change as "bottom-up" because when implemented successfully it results in new public-private partnerships, the growth of civil society, government officials more responsive to people's needs, and a reformation of state and national social policies to promote local empowerment. 

           As cases from around the world have illustrated abundantly, such an approach leads local communities to have a heightened stake in their own development and to create self-help projects that further economic development, promote public health, and encourage progress that enhances people's lives in other key areas.

            There are many benefits of community development based on broad local participation that make it applicable to a diverse range of domestic and international challenges facing the United States.  The coherent vision offered by this approach to social change provides Senator Osama with a special and perhaps unique opportunity to enunciate detailed policies that he would pursue as president--policies that would also attract Independents and Republicans and add substance to his claim that he has the right kind of experience to lead the United States in the twenty-first century.

          Consider, for example, the issue of international free trade.  As devastating as free trade can be for manufacturing towns in different parts of the United States, its dislocation effect in developing countries, particularly in rural areas, can be even more acute.  Under NAFTA, Mexico has seen a considerable decline in rural employment, lower prices for land and farm products, greater urban migration, rising income inequality, and increasing agricultural trade deficits. 

          Morocco, which entered into free trade with the United States in 2004, took heed of Mexico's experience and delayed free trade in the agricultural sector for 10 years to pave the way by modernizing its agricultural practices and diversifying its rural economy.  This is where community organizing steps in.  The new development projects that emerge from local participation in community initiatives nurture economic diversity and expand the income base through training and implementing the ideas for the development of local peoples. 

          This approach better enables hard hit communities to adapt to the economic restructuring caused by free trade while building a foundation for more rapid development.  Senator Obama can therefore claim correctly, as he did at the Democratic primary debate at Howard University, that his community organizing background gives him precisely the experience necessary to create policies and reform existing free-trade agreements in order to revitalize communities at home and abroad that have experienced the extremely harsh effects of free trade but not its benefits.

          Regarding reconstruction and reconciliation efforts in Iraq, only in the past year did the United States decide to "go local" to achieve successful outcomes.  An experienced community organizer such as Senator Obama can readily see that the widespread use of foreign contractors undermined both the Iraqis themselves and the United States.

          The evidence in Iraq clearly suggests that people do not attack projects that they design, manage, and control.  The opportunity lost from not directing the tens of billions of dollars to community-based reconstruction and reconciliation created the opening, perhaps more so than anything else, for the deadly violence, the millions of people dislocated, and other disasters that followed.  Because of his experience, Senator Obama can outflank Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, on this issue.  Though Senator McCain was a critic of how the war has been conducted militarily, he has not been nearly as vocal about the colossal reconstruction failure and the insecurity it has created in Iraq as well as its toll on the United States.

          On the domestic front, his community organizing perspective can inform Senator Obama's approach to the White House Office of Faith-based Initiatives.  Senator Obama stated that, as president, he would review this program to ensure that its funded initiatives are open to everybody and are not used to proselytize. 

          I suggest one way to do this is to require individual initiatives to include implementing partners from different religious institutions.  Such a requirement could help address first-amendment concerns related to faith-based programs while helping to ensure the long-term success of the initiatives themselves since partnership is an essential component of any successful community development.  Indeed, the more collaborators, the more groups and individuals there are that seek to maintain the project's continuity.      

          Senator Obama's community organizer perspective also can be quite appealing to Republicans and Independents who would appreciate the local empowerment approach as an especially effective way to address the poverty and dislocation caused by free trade. The senator can use also this special perspective to explain to these key groups why the Iraq war has gone so bad, and how faith institutions can continue to play a significant, if somewhat different role in his administration. 

          His experience in community work is indeed the right and needed experience to formulate social policies that can revitalize the U.S. economy from the bottom-up, promoting development and helping the government to manage conflicts around the world.  Throughout the campaign, Senator Obama should seize on every opportunity to carefully explain the community organizer experience and how it will inform his policies as president, always using examples of specific issues of vital interest to the electorate.

     Decentralization has divergent meanings and serves different ideological interests.  Generally, however, it seeks greater representation in development initiatives from the popular majority, the local poor, and from political, religious, ethnic, and tribal groups.  The purpose of decentralizing initiatives is to more effectively satisfy local needs (in poverty alleviation, education, health, environment, etc.) while utilizing local resources, such as community labor and the latent capabilities of people.  To be successful, then, decentralizing programs build administrative capabilities of local government and private groups, including their capacities to plan development, resolve conflicts, and manage financial and other resources.

     In the process, a certain amount of autonomy from political and economic national centers and from global dynamics is created.  This is not to suggest that national governments no longer retain important roles to play.  National governments retain responsibility for macroeconomic and foreign policies, the national judiciary, and in other vital areas.  However, a clear aim of decentralization is greater self-sufficiency at the micro-regional level, which allows greater flexibility, speed, and efficiency in dealing with matters of development.

     Local communities have a stake in maintaining decentralized systems because they are more responsive to them, sensitive to their interests, and equitable in the distribution of resources. Central governments benefit by creating overall targets and inter-regional balance and competition that can foster performance, affecting remote areas far from the national capital, and increasing political stability, national unity, and their own legitimacy.  Both local community and national self-reliance is therefore strengthened through decentralization.

     The idea of decentralization is not new.  The 1960s and 1970s marks when many countries began decentralization efforts. There was a shift back to central control by the 1980s, after the oil shocks of the 1970s.  In recent years, decentralization and local participation in development are again in favor.

     The paralyzing socio-economic conditions facing the Palestinian people suggest prime opportunities for this type of engagement.  Eighty-five percent of the people in Gaza depend on humanitarian aid to survive, and per capita income is less than half of what it was in the late 1990s.  The Palestinian economic structure is dependent on Israel’s: approximately 80 percent (some figures are as high as 90 percent) of all imports to the West Bank and Gaza are from Israel, and more than 90 percent of all exports go to Israel. Palestinian economic dependency on Israel, certainly among the most extreme cases of international dependency in the world, makes their relations bitter and volatile, and perpetuates the severe underdevelopment of the Palestinian people. Relief and opportunities for livelihoods are what the Palestinians need immediately, to be achieved in a manner that instills self-reliance, restructures the economy, decreases its vulnerabilities to external influences, and enhances regional stability.

     Perhaps the ultimate justification of decentralized development programs is found in cases from around the world of projects that further economic development (employment, production, local ownership, rates of growth, and profit) and provide social benefits (education, health, social cohesion (including intergenerational), and dignity).  Through community involvement, projects are more quickly implemented for immediate relief than typical development interventions, with small and dispersed costs and shared risk.  The efficiency of delivery of goods and services are also increased, and, very importantly, the economic base becomes more diversified which discourages dependency.

     The devastating socio-economic reality of the Palestinians have unwittingly created one favorable situation that enables the broad implementation of decentralization: nongovernment organizations have become very strong and have taken on the role of service providers in the absence of an active government.  There are local and multilateral agencies in the occupied territories, such as the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee and the UNDP respectively, who create positive examples of decentralized managed projects.  There is a plethora of indigenous development associations (many of whom are Islamic) to potentially partner with and transfer the necessary skills to catalyze and organize community planning meetings, and help implement the projects local Palestinian people determine together.  Thousands of Palestinian men and women from all walks of life, beginning with those who already interface with local communities, can be trained in organizing and facilitating the necessary community meetings where local people determine their development goals and implement projects to achieve them.  An average of two facilitators per rural village or a neighborhood of a several hundred people is a productive ratio.  The Near East Foundation’s Center for Development Services located in Cairo offers a fine model of an institution that provides development training and materials to support decentralized community initiatives.
    
     A funding level for training and projects at $500 million over three years (an amount certainly possible considering that the international community recently pledged more than $7 billion to aid the Palestinian people over the same period) should enable half of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (a population of approximately 3.5 million people) to be significantly socio-economically impacted.  The Quartet partners, which include the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations, under whose auspices the aid was pledged, ought to strongly encourage the leadership of the Palestinians and Israelis (who mediate the delivery and use of foreign aid) to support the implementation of decentralized development in the occupied territories.  A collective bottom-up mobilization of this scale would give rise to explicit democratic political activism, and redefine local to national political equations of power that will increase institutional responsiveness to the public and decrease corruption.

     Fortunately, the broad-scale implementation of decentralization does not have to wait for a final status agreement with Israel.  Of course, under occupation and harsh internal conditions make it highly difficult at best to have community meetings with full participation.  However, international development experts, Michael Edwards and David Hulme, reflecting on decentralized development state that even under the most authoritarian conditions, “there are opportunities for progressive change.”  When the decentralization process gains momentum in the Palestinian areas, it could assist the political process with Israel, in part because of the less intense climate it would create.

     This development approach could be an area where common ground may be possible between some Western countries and Hamas, since the majority of Hamas’ activities have historically been in providing community services. Sooner or later, in one form or another, the United States and others are going to have to deal directly with Hamas, and working with them in decentralized democratic development in Gaza could affect Hamas’ current political positions that are untenable with peaceful coexistence with Israel. Indeed, Jeroen Gunning at the University of Wales noted that change is possible in core areas of Hamas’ ideology.  The Quartet should make every effort to test whether engagement with Hamas on the terms of decentralized development leads to moderation.

Yossef Ben-Meir is president of the High Atlas Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by former Peace Corps volunteers and dedicated to community development in Morocco.  This article is part of an essay entitled, “National Sovereignty through Decentralization: A Community-Level Approach to Conflict Management in Iraq and the Occupied Palestinian Territories”, that will be published in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. 

            Barack Obama’s community organizing background in Chicago gives him a special opportunity to expand his base of support to include the millions of Republican and Independent voters who identify closely with the principles of federalism.  Federalism, a founding precept of the Republican Party more than 150 years ago and currently often lauded by the party’s presidential candidate Senator John McCain, involves deference to states and localities in the management of their own affairs and social programs.

            Community organizing and federalism share many of the same core values, such as decentralized decision-making, capacity-building at the local level in management and administrative functions, and self-reliance.  Senator Obama ought to consistently connect his community organizing background to the ideals of federalism by describing how he has applied this deep and intrinsic principle through empowering people at the local level to improve their own lives.  His sustained emphasis of how his experience connects with core federalist principles will particularly attract Republicans and Independents who deeply value federalism and who no longer support continuing the devastating war in Iraq as does Senator McCain.

             Thus rather than simply mentioning his community organizing experience, which he often does during his political rallies and speeches, Senator Obama should spell out how it relates to the federalist perspective and how, as a result, he is uniquely qualified to apply its principles to dealing with many of the serious challenges the United States now faces and even explaining how those challenges came about.  For example, the general failure of Iraq’s reconstruction (when one considers potential versus actually attained benefits) is significantly rooted in the excessive and ultimately self-defeating level of foreign contractors involved, which has disempowered Iraqis, leaving far too many of them feeling that they do not have a stake in this effort.  The failure here has in fact helped to feed the violent resistance.  The United States has now come to realize its mistake and is working to correct it by involving Iraqis in the design and management of reconstruction projects.  But Iraq’s reconstruction as originally conceived and as undertaken up until recently was an affront to core principles of federalism, local control in decision-making, and community organizing.  Seen from this perspective, the mismanagement by the Bush administration of the reconstruction effort is quite stark and can be viewed as a betrayal by many Republicans of the federalist ideals championed by their own party.  Senator Obama should seize the opportunity to present himself as in the vanguard of federalist ideals; someone who has actually walked the walk as a community organizer, not a hypocrite who espoused the federalist ideals and then trampled on them.

              Another example of how Senator Obama can utilize his community organizer/federalist experience and gain further support in his efforts to be president is through how he explains and deals with the social dislocation caused by international free trade.  Free trade and globalization restructures economies, with brutal social effects as seen in parts of the United States and in developing economies, especially negatively impacting rural communities, such as in Mexico.  When discussing these difficult conditions, Mr. Obama should highlight how community organizing and federalist approaches (i.e., empowering people) he is familiar with from first-hand experience can bring new opportunities to local economies and help create socio-economic initiatives that enable individuals and businesses to adapt and develop.  Following this approach will help affirm the principle of federalism that many Republicans and others value and show its relevance in fashioning solutions to modern-day challenges at home and abroad.

            The Obama campaign can legitimately conflate community organizing and federalism.  After all, federalism is the political structure that enables and encourages local community organizing to occur.  By presenting community organizing as a federalist process, the campaign will attract those Republicans and Independents who are disaffected by the Iraq war, but who would otherwise still support John McCain.  This is why Senator Obama ought to continually use the federalist lexicon to describe the “bottom-up” strategies for social change that he clearly believes in.  If he does so, Republicans and Independents will cross over to him and he will forge a coalition that should make him the next president of the United States.

Yossef Ben-Meir is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of New Mexico and president of the High Atlas Foundation (www.highatlasfoundation.org), a nonprofit organization founded by former Peace Corps Volunteers who served in Morocco and dedicated to the rural community development of that country.  

It may initially seem a paradox that national-level governments are strengthened when they decentralize decision-making power by giving local communities control over, or at least a decisive voice in, matters relating to their own development.  One naturally assumes that a country’s autonomy is strengthened the more power is concentrated at the national level.

However, in reality, when national governments assist initiatives that enable a community to determine and implement its priority development projects (in job creation, education, health, environment, etc.), they create in the process diverse administrative partnerships at all domestic levels. Everyone benefits.  Local organizations and communities are desirous of maintaining these partnerships at the national level because government support helps satisfy their specific needs and better enables the people to shape the institutions that govern them.  Central governments also benefit because by creating overall goals that encourage inter-regional balance and competition, they can foster better performance, positively affect areas far from the national capital, and enhance the central government’s legitimacy.  The diverse benefits of decentralized development enable it to generate what is particularly needed to help resolve the complex regional conflicts involving, for example, complex regional conflicts involving, for example, Iraq, the Israelis and Palestinians, and the Western Sahara with Morocco.

There are a wealth of examples of decentralizing initiatives with national support from all over the world and in history.  As early as 1956, the Administrative Committee of the United Nations stated that a major function of national governments is to unite with the efforts of the people and improve the conditions of local communities. In both mixed economies and socialist societies in Asia, for example, rural institutions became more effective promoters of development because of support from higher levels of government.  In Brazil, the process of decentralization and the local participation it encourages allowed citizens to be directly involved with municipal fiscal planning that in turn enhanced transparency and responsiveness of social services.  Joint forestry programs in India, organized by local organizations, met with government encouragement, which led to the central government’s enhanced legitimacy.  The organization of the United States is also based on the same idea, that is, the principle of federalism or decentralization.  The system of federalism is central to the U.S. Constitution, which imposes limits on the national government by giving local and state governments substantive independent powers.   

“Participatory development” has become the term used to refer to community planning methods that create decentralization.  These methods involve the participation of “facilitators” who organize local community-wide meetings at which participants plan their own development projects.  Teachers, government extenionists in the ministries of agriculture, health, education, and so forth, community workers from NGOs, personnel from international public and private groups, and local community members can all be effective facilitators.  Once trained, facilitators bring local people together to assess their social and environmental conditions and determine and implement development projects in areas most important to them – such as in job creation, education, and health, among others. 

In the case of the Palestinians, their economic structure is extremely dependent on Israel.  This dependency makes Israeli-Palestinian relations increasingly bitter and volatile while perpetuating the extreme economic underdevelopment of the Palestinian people.  What the Palestinians immediately need are relief and opportunities for livelihood achieved through fostering a self-reliance that restructures their economy, decreases its vulnerabilities to external influences, and enhances regional stability.

Decentralization, it was found, advances local and national self-reliance, which, in turn, is associated with increases in independence from external control, self-help, and self-governance. Palestinian communities will increase their power and the influence of indigenous institutions and of the civil society.  Significant democratic foundations will be established, and internal political processes will be more responsive and accountable.  Decentralization vests control at the community level and can consequently more quickly generate life-sustaining development projects, which also cost less.

This development approach could work best in some areas where aspects of partnership may be possible with Hamas, since the majority of Hamas’ activities are already in community services.  The impacts of working together wherever possible with even perceived enemies can in time affect overall relations between larger groups and even between societies.

In Iraq, the sectarian conflict is placing the central government in jeopardy, with the country breaking apart or a loose federal arrangement seemingly the most likely outcome.   The creation of development programs as outlined here offers a third possible outcome, which is Iraq’s central government can increase its chances of survival and utility by supporting reconstruction programs that are driven in their design, implementation, and evaluation by local communities. 

Decentralization can readily incorporate local reconciliation processes, which in turn can significantly influence decisions made at the regional and national levels.  Another advantage of participatory projects is that they are dispersed, small in scale, and thus are not as strategic of targets as the more visible and foreign-conceived reconstruction projects insurgents typically sabotage.  In addition, ample evidence from Iraq itself strongly suggests people do not destroy reconstruction projects that they determine and then manage themselves. 

It is impossible to justify in developmental terms the extreme involvement of foreign companies in the reconstruction of Iraq.  The opponents of peace, in a context where communities receive the real benefits from their participation in development, may have been dealt with internally by the Iraqi people themselves, and in ways that allowed for the continued benefits of the larger majority.  This is why the United States should immediately follow through on the Iraq Study Group’s suggestion to allocate $5 billion for reconstruction, and direct these funds toward assisting local people to come together, plan, and implement projects that meet their self-determined socio-economic and environmental needs.  No other approach is now on the table that can enable Iraqis to feel more vested in their surroundings and future, further the reconciliation, development, and political tracks, and provide the national government with legitimacy and purpose (and perhaps save it) through giving this type of projects its full and active support.

As a final example, last April, the Moroccan government submitted to the United Nations Security Council an “autonomy within Moroccan sovereignty” proposal for a resolution to the 32 year old Western Saharan conflict.  The proposal catalyzed intensive negotiations among the parties (including Morocco and the Polisario, with Algeria and Mauritania invited to observe) under the auspices of the United Nations. 

Considering Morocco’s position to enable the maximum possible autonomy for Western Sahara within the context of its existence within Moroccan sovereignty, it should broadly assist the coming together of Western Sahara’s local people so they can plan and implement their priority development projects.  This will create greater autonomy for the Saharan region, bring desperately needed relief and opportunity to the approximate 160,000 Sahrawi refugees, and forge mutually beneficial relationships and institutional connections with Morocco.  If the process goes forward, new trust and partnerships among the parties could help to more clearly define the form of regional autonomy within a broader sovereignty that Morocco proposes.

Morocco’s broad support of decentralization of development in the Western Sahara would affect the results of a referendum in Western Sahara that helps to decide its future (that is, if the parties agree to the terms upon which a referendum were to take place).  Individuals and organizations that support projects created by communities in the process advance their public diplomacy too.  Pursuing the projects communities wanted – that met their self-described needs – wins hearts and minds and will influence who wins the “war of ideas.”  It is this kind of action that should form the basis of United States public diplomacy in the Arab-Muslim world. 

Yossef Ben-Meir teaches sociology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.  He is also President of the High Atlas Foundation – a nonprofit organization that assists rural development in Morocco.

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