The World Bank's land of kiosks: Community driven development in Timor-Leste

Ben Moxham

Development in Practice, 2005, vol. 15, issue 3-4, 522-528

Abstract: The World Bank's Community Empowerment and Local Governance Project (CEP) was the key donor programme to assist with community reconstruction in a newly independent Timor-Leste. Commencing in 2000, the US$18 million project provided funds to over 400 local development councils that had been newly created to meet their community's development needs. Rather than creating genuine participatory structures, tight deadlines to disburse project funds and bureaucratic project rules reduced the councils to little more than transmission lines to Bank-controlled dollars. By bypassing existing governance structures, including that of the fledging government, the councils also bypassed sources of local legitimacy and technical knowledge, which resulted in community conflict, indifference, and poor project sustainability. The CEP's poorly administered microcredit scheme led to a proliferation of unviable kiosks—underlining the folly of hastily attempting to construct a market economy on a deeply scarred subsistence economy.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09614520500075953 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cdipxx:v:15:y:2005:i:3-4:p:522-528

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cdip20

DOI: 10.1080/09614520500075953

Access Statistics for this article

Development in Practice is currently edited by Emily Finlay

More articles in Development in Practice from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().