By ALBERT VAN ZYL – Deficiency #3:Weakening the oversight capacity of the legislature

The ideal roles of a legislature can be summarised as making laws and overseeing the executive’s implementation of those laws.
The ability of the legislature to perform these functions is based on two key relationships; the one it has with the executive, and the one between individual MPs and their electorate.
Constituency Development Fund (CDF) risks compromising the integrity of both.
1. Impact on the relationship between the legislature and the executive:
It has been argued that CDFs strengthen the role of the legislature by making them less dependent on the executive for funding; they now have money to spend on the projects that they think are important.
But this arrangement distracts MPs from their core business and could even make them more dependent on the executive, thus making it more difficult to oversee the work of the latter.
CDFs compromise the independence required by legislatures to oversee the executive effectively. With the executive controlling large amounts of money destined for individual MPs, it is easy for the executive to pressure them into complying with its wishes.
As an example, in the 2008 presidential campaign in Zambia, the incumbent president promised to raise the CDF per constituency to K1.0bn (approx. US$ 225,000), while the opposition candidate promised K4.0billion (approx. US$ 900,000) per constituency if elected (Zambia CDF).
This dynamic of “buying” compliance from the legislature is one factor that explains the rapid growth in the size of CDFs.
CDFs can distort the policy perspective of MPs, as well. In Pakistan, which has one of the longest running CDFs, this scheme has distracted MPs from their broader democratic role, with MPs focusing their attention on local issues to the neglect of legislative and policyinterventions from a national perspective (Pakistan CDF).
It also has increased the workload of MPs, who spend a majority of their time finalising CDF schemes rather than making good laws and holding the executive to account for implementing them.
In Kenya MPs were even prepared to delay the approval of the overall budget in order to force increases in CDF allocations (“MPs want Uhuru to double CDF in Budget,” The Standard, 25/05/2009). This illustrates to what extent the CDF can distract MPs from their core functions.
In addition to potentially compromising the ability of the legislature to perform its oversight role, CDFs can undermine the public’s ability to hold the executive to account for meeting its needs.
The executive branch of governments has tended to support the introduction of CDFs because such schemes could help to shift the responsibility for capital investment away from them and onto MPs, even though CDFs normally only make up a small portion of total state expenditure (Oxford Analytica 2009).
A number of anecdotes have emerged from Kenya of the executive telling people to “go and ask their MP” to build a school or a well-point.
2. Impact on MP-constituent relations CDFs compromise not only the relationship between the executive and the legislature but also that between MPs and their constituencies.
Baldeosingh (in Centre for International Development 2009) argues that CDFs could contribute to further shifting the relationship between MPs and their constituents from its proper democratic basis (MPs represent constituents interests in national policy decisions) to a financial basis (MPs bring home the bacon).
Given the multitude of governance weaknesses in developing countries, it would be simplistic to argue that CDFs create clientelism, or even that they are the single most important factor that supports this practice. But there is evidence to suggest that they may play a significant role in reinforcing it.
Ideally, MPs are supposed to represent the interests of their entire constituency in the making of laws and overseeing the work of the executive.
When their role narrows to one of delivering direct benefits in exchange for electoral support, important parts of their legislative and oversight roles may fall by the wayside. At the very least there is less incentive for legislators to represent their electorate’s position on issues not related to the CDF.
The long-term effect of such actions is that the MP’s performance in the use of their CDF allocation becomes a measure of their effectiveness.
In the Philippines, for example, the view of more and more voters is that MPs should be evaluated on their ability to bring in benefits to their constituency, not to make laws and contribute to the legislative debate (Chua and Cruz 2004). In this way CDFs could undermine MP’s national policy-making role or focus (Centre for International Development 2009).
In Uganda the Africa Leadership Institute found that voters were basing their view of MPs’ performance on community projects — “material things that the member was able to bring to the constituency. Clearly the legislative role of the legislator was not well recognised or given the prominence it deserves (Africa Leadership Institute 2007).”
Keefer and Khemani (2009) demonstrate that CDFs can ultimately reduce the relationship between the MP and the electorate to absurd dimensions.
They find that MPs make less effort to deliver CDF projects when they are politically secure in their constituency and do not feel compelled to provide patronage: “West Bengal, the only state where a single political party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has dominated state politics and leadership since 1977, stands out as a state with significantly and substantially lower MPLADS spending than other states.
Average spending in constituencies in West Bengal is 18 percentage points lower than average spending in other states.”
In a paper, Goran Hyden describes the two competing dynamics in poor countries as “clientelist” and “developmentalist” (Hyden G. 2010). The above examples show how CDFs could contribute to clientelism and to the perceived role of MPs being “automatic teller machines” rather than being representatives of the people in the governance process.
Conclusion
This paper summarises the growing concerns around CDF schemes. Enough evidence exists to suggest that they put unwelcome pressure on service delivery and accountability systems in countries where these systems are already weak.
Rather than introduce CDFs, poor countries should strengthen their legislatures and pursue decentralisation programs more vigorously. In countries where CDFs are established and unlikely to be scrapped, their weaknesses should be mitigated through increasing citizen participation, progressively distributing funds, implementing rigorous reporting and third party oversight of CDF activities, and developing sufficient project management capacity.
As indicated earlier, the impact of CDFs needs to be researched much more thoroughly than has been done to date. In February 2010 the IBP convened a meeting in Washington, D.C., that brought together civil society organisations (CSOs) concerned about the impact of CDFs in their respective contexts.
In addition to discussing CDF practices in their countries, the participants developed a framework for further joint advocacy and research on CDFs. The IBP and its partners will conduct some of this research over the next two years, largely following the three areas of concern outlined in this brief.
Through this research, we will endeavor to examine these fundamental hypotheses:
*       CDFs breach the separation of powers,
*       CDFs distribute allocations less progressively than other funding mechanisms,
*       CDF allocations and project selection are used to influence the
results of elections,
*       CDF projects are less aligned with local development priorities than other local infrastructure projects,
*       CDFs displace funding that might otherwise have gone to local governments and impose a number of administrative and monitoring burdens on the latter,
*       the implementation of CDF projects is more poorly monitored than that of other projects, CDFs weaken the ability of the legislature to oversee the executive,
*       CDF enhance clientelistic aspects of the relationship between MPs and the electorate, and
*       Weak legislatures are more likely to adopt CDFs than strong ones.
The Centre for International Development (2009) observes that CDFs have come about largely in parliamentary systems.
This raises the question of whether CDFs are “compensation for the parliament’s inability to amend the budget in these systems.”
If this interpretation is correct, one could argue that CDFs are a poor replacement for the long-term task of reforming, capacitating, and empowering legislatures to influence budget allocations and to hold the executive to account for the implementation of the budget. (Van Zyl is a researcher for the International Budget Project at the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The Project works to enhance the effective participation of civil society organisations in public budgeting in developing and transition countries. Van Zyl joined the IBP in August 2005 to work on a wide range of training and research activities).
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