From Colombo
Telegraph - Dr. W.A Wijewardena
There are projects all over but many of them are failed
projects
Human history is replete with projects enabling
civilisations to deliver marvellous creations through them. But many of them
have been failures right from the design stage. Sri Lanka’s recent history is
marred by a plethora of such failed projects due to errors in design. Of them,
the Hambantota Harbour failing to attract large draft ships due to low depth of
the harbour, the Mattala Airport with a runway perpendicular to the headwinds
forcing airlines to shun it and the Diyagama International Sports complex
with a running track slightly shorter in depth than the international standards
so that no international sports event could take place are some striking
examples.
The latest addition to this project failure is the acclaimed
public private partnership involving the Hyatt Hotel project in Colombo in
which costs have doubled due to profligate financial management, an issue
involving the failure to observe economic policy governance.
All these issues in projects could be overcome if all those
involved in public projects – politicians, bureaucrats, project managers and
civil society – are conversant with the first principles of projects.
Now those first principles have been codified in a comprehensive
manual type text by a Sri Lanka born academic – Nihal Amerasinghe – previously
at the Asian Development Bank or ADB and now a professor at the Asian Institute
of Management or AIM in Manila, the Philippines. The title of the text is
‘Design, Appraisal and Management of Sustainable Development Projects’.
A manual by an experienced practitioner
Nihal Amerasinghe is an aptly qualified academic cum
practitioner to write a text on project management. His long career has been
with ADB whose vocabulary has nothing but projects. Having completed a degree
in agriculture at Peradeniya University in Sri Lanka, he has acquired two
Master’s degrees in economics and environment from Manchester and London
Universities, respectively, followed by a doctorate in economics from the
latter. He is presently at AIM disseminating his wisdom as an academic. Thus,
Amerasinghe is a combination of practice with theory, the foremost requirement
for somebody to write a manual on a complex subject.
The logical organisation of the manual
The 25 chapters in Amerasinghe’s book have been presented in
five parts: The first part talks about projects and development, the second
about project identification and design, the third about project feasibility
and appraisal, the fourth about project implementation and control and the
fifth about the project completion and evaluation.
The chapters have been planned in such a way that they could
be mastered by interested readers separately as individual essays or together
as a single text to acquire the desired knowledge on project management.
Three serious flaws of development policy
Amerasinghe begins his book by analysing three serious flaws
in development policy planning attributed to Romanian-American Economist at the
University of California at Berkeley – Irma Adelman.
One is the reliance on a single contributor to keep
economies at low growth called ‘monocausalism’. Over the years, many such
important contributors have been identified but removing them from economies
has not led to economic growth demonstrating that growth is a multifaceted
activity. The second flaw is pursuing a single goal in development such as
increasing per capita income as had been done in Sri Lanka during the
administration of Mahinda
Rajapaksa.
Amerasinghe says that such pursuits have brought in greater
worries to countries such as inequality in income distribution, weakened
democracy, loss of cultural identity, overconsumption of natural resources and
environmental degradation and so on.
All these have been the result of Sri Lanka’s reported
higher economic growth in the past few years. The third is the most serious
flaw in policy: that is, believing that natural systems move on a straight line
enabling a country to attain a pre-planned economic growth without any
derailment.
Sri Lanka’s Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance have
been famous for making such linear economic growth forecasts to find that
actual realisations have always been at variance from the projected path. That
is because all natural systems are non-linear based on such laws as the law of
cause and effect, the law of impermanence and the law evolution. It is
therefore of importance that Sri Lanka’s policy authorities learn one or two
lessons from Amerasinghe.
Development is not just economic growth but many more
An important element highlighted by Amerasinghe is the
meaning of sustainable development which should be the aim of all nations
today. Drawing on Nobel Laureates Gunnar Myrdal and Amartya Sen, he has first
presented a wide definition of development that encompasses social, political,
cultural and humane aspects of living in addition to economic factors. Then, he
solidifies development by incorporating the concept of sustainable development
drawn basically from the Brundtland Commission headed by the former Norwegian
Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.
If you want to sustain, enjoy today without harming
tomorrow
According to Brundtland Commission, sustainable development
is the meeting of the needs of the present generation without compromising the
ability of the future generations to meet theirs. It involves two generational
equities: Intergenerational equity where resources are passed onto the future
generations in reasonable conditions and intragenerational equity where the
same transfer takes place among different segments of the present generation.
Any public project should take into account this wider
concept of development and the need for making such development a sustainable
one. The ad hoc projects implemented in Sri Lanka in the recent past beg the
question whether these aspects have been considered at all at the design or
implementation stage.
The impact of a project is the key criterion of success
Public sector projects are normally appraised by public
authorities in terms of the money spent or the output produced. A classic
example is the Central Bank Annual Report or the Annual Report of the Ministry
of Finance which have tended to assess the success of projects in terms of
money spent on them. But Amerasinghe says that the important assessment criterion
should be the outcome of a project that leads to creating an impact on the
economy. The impact should not only be sustainable but also bring in ultimate
human development by expanding the opportunities available to them as human
beings.
Simple project management has now become a complex
process
Amerasinghe has provided a very interesting account of how
projects evolved from 1950s to date. In its evolution, the scope, design,
management and ultimate aims of projects too have expanded considerably from
six simple goals to 47 complex goals.
Amerasinghe has presented the six basic goals in a six-sided
polygon: economic, technical, political, administrative and managerial,
environmental and social and financial are these concerns. Then, he builds
around these six concerns different parameters or key sub concerns which have
been added to the goals of projects in each of the subsequent phases of their
evolution.
What actually started as a simple operation of project
management in 1950s has evolved today to a very complex structure that is not
easy for ordinary project management people to comprehend. Amerasinghe calls
this complex structure the ‘conundrum of 2000’. It contains practically all the
broad aims which a modern society aspires to attain in its social cultural,
political, economic, legal, administrative, financial and spiritual spheres.
There is a justification for this broad treatment, since it is taxpayers’ money
which is being used for public projects.
However, if a discipline becomes too complex, the likely
outcome would be the complete disregard of those added parameters when actual
project management exercises are conducted. Even when they are reckoned, the
project management still runs the risk of their not being treated seriously.
They just become a wish list in the minds of the project practitioners.
Amerasinghe too has raised the issue by questioning whether
the project management has become more effective over the years. But he notes
that according to the observations of major project financiers, namely, ADB and
the World Bank, project performance has improved despite the complexity built
into project goals. Only the projects implemented under the sponsorship of the
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Europe’s counterpart of the
World Bank, these goals have been only partially successful.
Project steps are also time involving intricate processes
Project cycle too is a 13 step complex process, according to
Amerasinghe. There are seven steps to be completed leading up to project approval:
identification, design and formulation, feasibility analysis, project
appraisal, project selection, negotiation and finally approval. These are also
complex processes and when it comes to developing countries, there is no home
based expertise available to complete them successfully. Hence, in many
instances, external assistance has to be solicited and such external assistance
is normally extended by the project financier himself leading to a conflict of
interest.
After the approval, there are 6 processes to be completed:
project activation, implementation, supervision, monitoring and reporting,
completion, evaluation and follow-up analysis and action. Amerasinghe has given
a detailed description of actions involved in each of these different steps.
This is where projects fail because in developing countries, the political
authorities which have arrogated powers to themselves for initiating projects
cannot wait such a long period to have project approved and a further period to
complete the project. Hence, many steps are overlooked similar to the disregard
of the broad goals involved in modern projects. Politicians who go by election
cycles and not the natural cycles demand that projects are completed in time
for them to market at elections though the accomplishments are half-baked and
bound to fail shortly.
A good example is the infrastructure projects undertaken by
the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration in the last 5 to 6 years. Amerasinghe has
been emphatic on evaluating the outcome and the impact of projects which have
to be done after the completion. These two aspects are mostly disregarded in
almost all the projects implemented under political patronage.
Many pitfalls of development planning
Planning has been considered the saviour of many developing
countries which have failed to maintain a reasonable rate of economic growth
and reduce poverty through continuous economic advancement. One question which
critics of governments normally raise is ‘where is your plan?’ and they opine
that ‘without a plan, how can an economy grow?’ Thus, all developing countries
have resorted to meticulous planning which they emulated from the experiences
of the former Soviet Union. India had a rolling planning system in every five
year period with emphasis for the state to make critical investments.
While admitting that many developing countries have planning
capability today than before, Amerasinghe has laboriously documented the
reasons for the failure of development plans. They arise from external forces,
shortcomings of planning process itself and due to problems which planners
would run into in plan implementation. Important external forces are the lack
of peace, wars, natural calamities and increases in world prices that derail
plans. In the planning process, often identified causes are the inadequate
preparation including capacity, lack of credible data, disregard of the
importance of governance, corruption and most importantly failure to learn from
previous mistakes.
Plan implementation is hindered, according to Amerasinghe,
due to budgetary constraints, ownership issues, conflicts, bureaucratic
inefficiencies, harmful political interferences and failure to effectively
monitor plans. These are critical issues but can be resolved if due recognition
is paid to capacity development and management of politicians. But one of the
issues in development planning is the availability or mobilisation of resources
as displayed by Sri Lanka’s Five Year Plan in 1971.
Without resources, the targets and objectives of a plan are
just wish lists. If a country’s government is infested with a weak budgetary
situation and the private savings are insufficient to finance the planned
activities, resorting to foreign financing becomes crucial for planning. But if
a country does not have a good governance structure, the mobilisation of
adequate foreign funds will be a problem.
An important manual enriching the toolkit of project
practitioners
The rest of the book is a detailed manual of project design,
appraisal and management. Amerasinghe has drawn on his rich practical
experience in these areas to make his manual a comprehensive document. A
project practitioner does not have to turn to any other document to design and
implement a project successfully. It is a self-contained manual with elaborate
explanation of steps to be followed, checklists to be marked off and ways to
tackle delays and problems.
The practical use of the manual has been enhanced immensely
by the colourful illustrations that have been added to chapters for easy
understanding of the complicated processes involved. There are many exercises
which the practitioners have to work out in order to self-test their learning.
There is a step by step building up of answers to critical issues, a novelty
that one finds in a manual. Each chapter starts with an introduction that would
guide the user what to expect from it. After presenting the body of knowledge,
it ends with a summary of key points helping the user to revisit his learning
outcome.
The manual on Design, Appraisal and Management of
Sustainable Development Projects by Nihal Amerasinghe is a timely addition to
enrich the toolkit of project practitioners throughout the globe.
*W.A Wijewardena, a former Deputy Governor of the Central
Bank of Sri Lanka, can be reached at waw1949@gmail.com
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