Preliminary Analysis of Development Programs Performance

Abstract

The regional development programs promoted by the national governments and international multilateral agencies, like the World Bank and the Inter American Development Bank, are oriented to public policies under which public goods, like public services and infrastructures, are supplied to underdeveloped regions, many in Latin America. More a more evidences are pointing to the fact that success of these programs depends in a good part of externalities, which are related to the changes in the form of networking and values among the stakeholders in the territory. These externalities are defined as the Social Capital.

As externalities, they are not directly evaluated in the projects economic and social impact, but accepted to exist and the planners of the projects do acknowledge the importance of social networking, although never assessed.

Several approaches have been proposed for the assessment of the Social Capital. For managing development projects, the Woolcock approach is considered one of the more interesting.

The objective of the research project described in this paper is to measure up front the social capital of a given regional development project, from the project plans before implementation, and to compare the social capital results with those of the benefits according to the drafted project framework agreed upon the multilateral agencies and the region authorities.

The regional program selected is the "Programa de Desenvolvimiento da Zona da Mata" (PROMATA) in the State of Pernanbuco Brazil, under the sponsor of the Inter American Development Bank. The project was designed to induce development in which community resources were to be mobilized, with the intention of getting the stakeholders involved as proponents and protagonists of social change in their territories. That social based bottom-up framework was a very interesting opportunity to observe the social capital component given the profile of the project.

The research was carried out with the project just finished, which provided the background to compare the up-front analysis with the changes in the social network and values observed.

The drafted project plans, including all programs and actions to be implemented, and the preliminar budget, are evaluated using a modified Regnier Abacus by a panel of experts in International Development Projects adapted to reflect the Social Capital model based on Woolcock attributes.

The results were processed using Correspondence Analysis and Bayes Model to produce the indexes associated with Woolcock attributes reflected in the decision matrices used to represent the Social Capital status.