Just how communal are rural communities?

This sociologist and long-time municipal activist shares the sobering findings of a study done in three rural districts in different parts of the country that asked a wide array of important questions at the community level.

Silvio Prado

We in the Center for Political Studies and Analysis (CEAP) have commonly done research from the municipal perspective, but one day we ques-tioned the validity of this sphere of study. We began to feel that it was insufficient to really tell us what was happening in urban neighborhoods and rural districts, above all the latter. How much do rural communities participate in the projects implemented in their territories and how are they really organized? Do they know how much money is being invested in the projects that come their way, how it’s distributed and who benefits?

Rural dynamics are very
different from urban ones

All this seemed pertinent for us to study because we constantly see projects touted on signs along the highways throughout Nicaragua: a drinking water project, a solid waste project, a road project… Do people know who’s financing them, who’s administrating them? We realized that taking a look from the rural community level rather than the municipal one might reveal interesting aspects. That was the origin of the idea of doing a study that looks at how rural communities are organized, what their dynamics are, how and how often they meet, what their leaders are like, how they participate to resolve problems that come up… At bottom, we wanted to know how communal the communities in the countryside actually are.

So the study we did isn’t about municipal dynamics, but community ones. Nor is it about urban dynamics, but rather rural ones, which are very different. In the cities there are more places for meetings, the media have more influence, there’s greater proximity among the whole population, people move around more and the influence of diverse actors is greater. In the rural areas we first discovered how hard it is even to learn where a particular district begins and ends. If you go to the mayor’s office of Camoapa, for example, and ask how many districts it has, they tell you there are 60 but the Ministry of Health says 52 and another institution gives you yet another figure. So in the rural sphere you have to start by accepting geographic indetermination, by not knowing how far “my territory” extends… This doesn’t happen in the cities. Each barrio knows what streets define it, and when you’ve stepped into a neighboring barrio. The rural districts have much less defined limits.

The nuts and bolts of the research

We selected districts from three municipalities for our study, choosing them for their different demographic and physical criteria, geographic zones and the political stripe of their municipal governments. We looked for districts with similar populations, distributed in a similar number of houses: some 50 houses and 75 families. We ended up studying districts in the following municipalities: Santa Teresa in the department of Carazo, south of Managua; San Lorenzo in Boaco, in the center of the country; and Mozonte in Nueva Segovia, in the north. The field work was done by a team of three young researchers who lived in these communities for a month and a half. In each community we set out to learn its history, how it came into existence, how the people got there. For the study we combined anthropological techniques such as life histories, reconstruction of each district’s history and maps that micro-localized the projects implemented in a given period of time, and also did surveys of virtually all the homes. We wanted our team to live with the people and share everything with them in order to learn how they function inside their communities.

The study’s objectives included learning what the community organizations are like and how community leaders respond to and resolve the challenge of unity in the community, stimulating its participation in public affairs and in problem solving, and how they represent the community and negotiate problems with government authorities as well as with international organizations and other civil society organizations. We also wanted to characterize their own organizations: what they’re like, how they function and what political science refers to as “institutional culture,” i.e. how they meet, design their agenda and choose their leaders, whether the leaders are held accountable…

We think the results could serve as a guide for anyone working in community development, as well as municipal authorities and anyone in organizations, particularly NGOs, that promote participation.

An earlier study served as
an analytical stepping-stone

We had already tested out the importance of community organizations in another investigation we did simultaneously with the Local Development Network’s Citizen Participation Observatory. That one covered 23 municipalities with over 1,700 people; a quite significant sample. In that study 37% of the population surveyed said they participated in some type of organization in their community. Although we would like to see greater participation, the fact that over a third of Nicaragua’s population participates in some organization isn’t insignificant. At that time we found a wide array of organizations: Potable Water and Sanitation Committees (CAPS), health brigades, religious organizations, cooperatives and organizations of parents, of midwives… Obviously political organizations also showed up on the lists. The Observatory found an increase in the number of people saying they belong to a political party, in this case the governing party or its para-party organizations: Sandinista Youth, Citizen’s Power Cabinets, Family Cabinets… Previously people were more diligent about hiding their party ties, although only a little less than half of that organized 37% said they were organized politically, and few of those that they were organized with the Liberals.

We used these in-depth results to analyze the information gathered from our new study of community dynamics in three rural districts. The results probably can’t be statistically extrapolated to all of the country’s rural districts , but I do believe they’re comparable. In the presentations we’ve made, we’ve found very similar patterns throughout the country in the functioning of the organizations, the performance of the leaders and also the work methodologies of the NGOs that promote community participation. If we cross the results of our study in the three districts with those of the Observatory in the 23 municipalities, we can state that our findings are very similar.

What leads people to organize?

With respect to the origin of the organizations, we discovered that the great majority weren’t the initiative of the district’s own population. We did find one women’s cooperative that had organized into a seed cooperative and only afterward sought outside advice. But cases that were the result of the community’s own initiative are the minority. Most have an external origin, influenced by some entity that showed up: a church, an NGO, a central government ministry, a social movement…

We already know that the main trigger for any organization is always problems and the urgency of the need to resolve them. Some organizations were created to resolve a specific problem in the community itself; this is certainly the case of the CAPS, which took on the challenge of providing the drinking water service and organizing the community around that.

We also found an intermediate category: organizations formed by outside influence that then take advantage of local potential. These are cases in which an NGO or other organization comes around, perceives a complaint or problem in the population, such as the clear-cutting of a hill, for example. It then accompanies the community, making use of the population’s capacities and disposition to provide a response to the problem until the problem is solved, and in the process a longer-lasting committee is organized.

We observed that in cases in which the organizations were the result of outside influence, they tend to become highly dependent on the entity that created them, to the extreme that they don’t meet without a push from that external factor. The Catholic Prayer Group we found in one district of San Lorenzo doesn’t meet if the priest doesn’t “send down the order.” It’s the same with a health brigade from another district, which waits for guidance from the Ministry of Health to meet and act. Such organizations have no functional autonomy.

The operational structure and norms

We found two types of organizations. Some are more formalized, like the CAPS, which, stimulated by Law 722, created a board of directors and their own bylaws and regulations, and registered with their municipal mayor’s office. The cooperatives are also formalized, because they, too, have a legal framework and are regulated by the Nicaraguan Institute of Cooperative Promotion (INFOCOOP). But most organizations we found aren’t very formal, even though we learned that NGOs have played a major role in trying to get them to formalize, training and accompanying them in that process.

In fact, we found so much informality that it raises the following question: Could an entity be called a community organization if it has no operational norms, doesn’t establish any duties for its members and doesn’t have any regulations for electing authorities or distributing the goods and services it generates?

We also found a type of organization we decided to call “subsidiary”: representatives of the agencies financing a specific project. Many project committees are just that; they aren’t community organizations, and their organizational level is fragile.

Institutional culture

The main weakness of the organizations can be seen in decision-making. We found this aspect very interesting because we’ve spent years saying that civic participation is indispensable to influencinh the decisions of public authorities. But if people aren’t taken into account in the decisions being made about the nearest and most immediate realities in their own community, everything we’ve been saying is empty rhetoric. The organizations aren’t serving as schools to initiate people into democracy.

What we mainly found was that decisions are made only by the board. Some even told us that while they have a board, not all of its members attend the meetings and in the end, “the president, the secretary and the treasurer end up deciding.” Just three people. And they told us, “When we ask the people, they don’t come to the meeting and we have to decide alone.”

Accountability

Being accountable is another problem we found. We’re very poor in that aspect; there’s no culture of accountability in this country. They’ve made some progress in the CAPS because money’s involved in the quota they charge for the water service, obliging them to show the financial accounting.

But being accountable doesn’t only have to do with presenting the organization’s financial balance sheets. It extends to other realities. For example, when an organization sends one of its members to a meeting to learn about something, that member represents the whole organization; he or she goes in the name of everybody who belongs to it. But when they get back they don’t tell anybody what they said, what they learned, what happened, what agreements or commitments were made... Many workshops we do are set up to train people who will then—in theory—go back to the communities and train the others, in line with the idea we’ve created of “reproducers of knowledge.” But that method isn’t working. It may have worked at some point, but we’re seeing that it doesn’t anymore. Besides, it’s usually the same person who goes to all the workshops: on maternal mortality, drinking water, climate change… And the information doesn’t isn’t being shared with the rest of the population, it stays within a small group, in a kind of “ring” that not only monopolizes knowledge but at times also controls the resources. The system doesn’t work; we have to revise it, breaking with the assumption that the person who goes to the workshop will “multiply” what he or she learned back in the community. Nicaragua is surely the most “workshopped” country in the world, but we have to look for other methods to ensure that the knowledge really gets back to the communities.

In fact we discovered a serious problem linked to this retention of information. We all know that information is power. Both male and female community leaders are perfectly aware that the more information they manage, the more power accrues to them. And indeed we found the information concentrated in the leader. When we asked about the number of people vaccinated, we were sent to the health leader; when we asked if the drinking water has reduced diarrhea in children, we were told to ask the health leader… So leaders become people who accumulate all the knowledge instead of sharing it with the rest of the community because that gives them power.

Social cohesion

Another topic we wanted to investigate was the degree to which the organizations contribute to the community’s social cohesion. Social cohesion is a crucial aspect, because there is no community without it. You can have a whole pile of bricks, but without an internal structure and cement, you won’t have a house; you have to make it all stick together. So first we asked people if their community is “stuck together,” if it’s united or disunited, and if the latter, what they believed to be the cause.

The majority told us they feel their community to be disunited and came up with various causes or reasons. The main one, surprisingly, isn’t political differences, but rivalries between families, particularly between the original families and those that settle there later. But since a process of endogamy takes places in these communities, it creates strife not only between the new and old families as a whole, but also between individuals: mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, father-in-law and son-in-law… and so the conflicts spread.

We found groups of people excluded for those reasons in all three districts studied. We saw that “the new ones” have never been integrated, are seen as pariahs, and so don’t figure in the plans or projects. Some would say it’s logical, that any process of social cohesion involves exclusions, an “us vs. them.” But in the cases we found, these exclusions don’t feed any community identity or cohesion, because they get thrown in the same pot as other internal divisions such as religious differences and political differences, as some are Sandinistas, others Liberals, others Conservatives.

The powerful role of exclusion

Despite this, one of our main findings was that the communities are crying out for a sense of community. They want communion, common spaces, places to come together. And they told us that every way they could.

We realized through this study that the community is the bedrock of exclusion, because it’s precisely there that the exclusion people feel is manifested the most crudely. They feel it because they aren’t invited to a meeting, don’t appear on the list of recipients of sheet metal roofing or solar panels... Being left out is felt more acutely in the community than in any other space. That realization disabused us of any idea that the community realm is characterized by inclusion and harmonious and peaceful coexistence. Quite to the contrary, it’s a space of very serious conflicts, and we’ve failed to prepare people to resolve them.

A need for conflict-resolution
and consensus-building skills

We discovered that one of the reasons there’s little sense of community is the lack of capacity to resolve conflicts. We’ve taught leaders how to build live fences, how to vaccinate, what gender issues are and a million other things, but we haven’t taught them—and I include myself in this criticism—how to settle conflicts. We’ve trained them to distribute seeds, to plant, to make a road, but haven’t taken into account that if this person is going to distribute scarce goods, it’s going to generate conflicts; that the mere fact of the road passing here rather than there is going to lead to conflicts among families. We don’t consider that if people say “the solar panels only went to the leader’s family,” it gets heard in the community and triggers conflicts even when it isn’t true.

We observed this lack of conflict resolution capacity in different spheres of community life. And there’s no authority to resolve them impartially in the community. Before, there was a person called a conflict mediator, but that role doesn’t exist anymore. If there’s no authority in the community and my neighbor’s pig crosses into my plot and eats the corn I planted, who’s going to work out that conflict? I can go to the police, but that’s five hours away by road. And if my neighbor reacts unreasonably, we end up resolving it with machetes.

The capacity to resolve conflicts isn’t installed and we haven’t developed it; we haven’t formed leaders with that capacity. We have to include methodologies in the “training package” for resolving conflicts and keeping them from getting to the machete and pistol stage. We need to teach that negotiation trumps imposition. It’s true that women tend to negotiate more and better than men, but we also need to teach them, because many women are leaders of their communities and haven’t been taught the skills to do it. There are also those who say that churches are good conflict mediators, but if a church of one denomination excludes those of a different religious creed, it’s useless for mediating conflicts. We observed a huge vacuum of that skill that erodes the sense of community.

We also found a need for leaders with the capacity to generate consensus in the community. As NGOs, our training work is geared to developing leaders’ ability to meet with people and talk to them about the projects on their agenda and get them to vote for the one they think should be the priority. But we don’t prepare them to build consensus, to negotiate, to attract those who don’t want to participate. In other words, both the leaders and the organizations we’ve formed are more dedicated to implementing projects than building an inclusive community.

Leaders for life

When we investigated leadership and the origin of the leaders’ legitimacy, we observed the same problem everywhere. We found few new leaders, either men or women, who haven’t played that role before.
It frequently happens that a project comes to the community and the project officer tells people “We’re going to make a penetration road to help get the production out, and someone’s going to have to head up the work, make the list, get and hand out the materials…” Everyone immediately points to the person who’s always been the leader because he or she “knows how to get things done.” So the person who was the leader in other issues also ends up dealing with the new road. Or the task falls to the midwife, because she “gets around a lot and knows everybody.”

This means little leadership regeneration. And we in the NGOs don’t help because we turn to those age-old leaders to save the time, money and effort involved in forming new ones. This results in some leaders having more strength and legitimacy than the organizations, to the point that the organizations are often referred to using the leader’s name. People we talked to didn’t say “the drinking water committee,” but rather “Juan López’s committee.” And the committee falls apart the day Juan López moves away or dies, because he accumulated so much power he became indispensable to the organization’s very existence.

We saw many cases of leaders elected for their charisma. That happens both in religious and health-oriented organizations, because people who work in health don’t earn much; they work voluntarily. People who work on vaccinations and campaigns against dengue and other epidemics don’t do it for the money and the population recognizes their merit for that. We discovered that working on health issues is one way to generate new leaders.

We interviewed leaders who have been in that position for years and when we asked them how often the people who elected them had evaluated their work, they all said never. We saw that evaluation mechanisms don’t exist.

Leaders have often not only held that role for years, but have passed the mantle on to their siblings or children. When you ask about something, people frequently respond, “Go ask such-and-such a family; they’re all leaders.” And it’s true, that’s where you find the midwife, the health leaders, the agro-ecologists… all in the same family. And not only that: the leader’s house is where you find the well, the seed center and other resources. We’ve seldom taken that x-ray of where power, knowledge and resources reside. The guidelines and creeds of all NGOs include avoiding concentrating power in just a few people, but we don’t act on it because it’s easier to work with people who have know-how, who get things done, which only creates new caudillos.

That family leadership, which is very common, is poison in the communities. Some would say it’s logical, that in the Vanegas’ community everybody’s a Vanegas and anybody who isn’t is at least close to them, so in the end all are related. The problem comes when everything gets concentrated in the house of the family nucleus, so instead of a network of leaders what you get is a ring, a closed circle, of leaders. And that produces disinterest and disillusionment in the rest of the population, undercutting its participation.

Women’s participation

And speaking of leaders, it’s not out of place to recall that the community is the ideal sphere for women’s participation. But in their traditional roles. We were able to validate that yet again: the higher up the leadership ladder a certain position is, the more women start lagging behind.

This has to do with the control exercised both by husbands and by the primordial role of caring for the children assigned to women. Although it’s also evident that women always have the most community participation, that participation is greater if it’s close to where she lives and to her children.

The best kind of organizations
are inclusive and serve everyone

We did a house-by-house survey in the community asking what organizations they felt best represented them and which ones they felt were the strongest. They all said the ones that provide services and distribute universal goods; in other words, those that serve the whole community and in which the whole community participates. They told us that they are most motivated to participate in meetings when they deal with issues of interest to everyone, and feel stimulated to participate when the invitations are inclusive, open to the whole community. They actually ask for more meetings and community assemblies, but without any exclusion. They state they want to be and feel part of something common.

They also say they like to go to meetings in which everyone has been given the same information. As they explained to us, “Why go to a consultation where the municipal budget is going to be discussed if I don’t know how much money there is for the community, if only three people know that?” In such a cases, they have every reason not to want to participate.

Organizations affiliated to selected groups are felt to be excluding. That’s the main problem the government’s Family Cabinets have today, as was true for their predecessor, the now deceased Councils of Citizens’ Power (CPCs). They are part of a pattern of selective and exclusionary origin. Although the Family Cabinets say they are for the whole community, when people go to one of their meetings they realize it isn’t true, and know from the outset that the same handful of people is going to make the decisions. To prove it one only has to see who goes to present the demands: the FSLN route coordinators.

Another thing people ask for is coordination among all the organizations. They feel that so many organizations and committees in the community divide and atomize. There’s no “umbrella” organization for all of them. Before 2007, the year the FSLN’s CPCs were imposed, Resident Associations were starting to be created and in municipalities in the department of Masaya the Boris Vega Law Firm was advising these new associations. Much before that Communal Development Committees had started to be organized in some municipalities with the aim of affiliating all sectors.

The people seem to miss entities like that, where all the community’s expressions are present and accounted for. Now there’s none of that, and the political conditions are exclusionary. Some people told us: “I don’t go to meetings in which they put the FSLN flag up because I don’t belong to that party.” People complain about that. “It’s true the FSLN paves 20 meters of road,” they say, “but they put their flags along five kilometers.” That makes people feel excluded.

Universal projects and shared
work help unite communities

When we asked what projects bring their community together, the majority responded universal ones, those that benefit everyone and not just a few. From that perspective, the CAPS contribute to community cohesion and unity because they provide a basic service to the whole community.

Cooperatives, on the other hand, don’t contribute to cohesion because they naturally have a selective membership. The same is true of religious groups, which select and exclude based on religious creed.

Another way of uniting the community is through shared work to provide an answer to a common problem. We were even told that responding to problems affecting individuals also unites them. In one community, for example, they told us of an entire family that fell ill and how the whole community came together to support them. That helped the community feel cohesive.

With respect to participation, we found that the majority of organizations are self-run. They virtually never turn to the public authorities when they have problems; they solve them by themselves. When we asked whether they seek out an authority or resolve it themselves even when a pipe breaks or a bridge falls down, more than half the people responded that they make every effort to find responses in the community, without turning to an outside authority. Among other things, that indicates to us that there’s good raw material in the communities to respond to problems in a participatory manner.

Little youth organizing

We didn’t observe much youth organization. We did find groups of young people organized in the health brigades, but no associations of youths as such. It’s only logical, because young people from rural communities emigrate. Some teenagers who had gotten involved in a drinking water committee confessed that they would leave the first chance they got. They see no future in the countryside.

Youth organizations are a more urban phenomenon. In the department of Chinandega, for example, the Youth Network is an important phenomenon. Boys and girls from various municipalities of Chinandega meet, form friendships, have their own agenda… Organizing in the city is easier because there’s greater proximity: they go to high school together and get together to go dancing, play sports, listen to music… In rural districts, young people don’t have those arenas.

We need to break with our old ideas

All these findings suggest the need to think about revising or breaking with many assumptions we took to be writ in stone. We mustn’t confuse a project committee with a community organization, however well the committee functions. An NGO’s project committee isn’t a community organization if the community doesn’t take it on; if it isn’t incorporated into the community dynamic, doesn’t contribute to community cohesion, doesn’t go beyond the road project or grain silo project and doesn’t accompany the community in resolving other problems.

We need to review the supposition that communities are arenas of harmonious coexistence, because they’re also arenas of conflict and exclusion. We must break with the assumption that leaders are agents that reproduce knowledge. We’ve excessively abused the methodology of rural outreach, which has served to reproduce technical knowledge about seeds, the cultivation of slopes, how to cure a cow, but doesn’t work when what we want is to build citizenship and form critical consciousness. If we train leaders with that methodology thinking that they are then going to go back and empower the community, we’re deceiving both ourselves and the community.

We have to ask ourselves why a community that has been “workshopped” so many times allows its citizen’s rights to be violated in exchange for the government giving out sheet metal roofing. The answer is that we haven’t formed critical consciousness in the community, only in some people. We have to find new methods for educating leaders in leadership skills.

The most intensely felt aspect of everything we found in these rural districts and that we can think is generalized in many others is the aspiration to develop more sense of community. This isn’t new. Years ago, when we’d go into a district and ask what was the first thing they needed, they’d ask for a chapel or a sports field. What was behind that was the need for a common space where they could come together. The reason is that in rural districts houses are separated by long distances, so people only see each other for a religious services, sports, saint’s day festivities or when someone dies.

We need to review our methodology for creating new groups or mini-agencies of “my NGO.” While it’s true that the greater the degree of organization, the stronger the community’s associative fabric, we should also work to shore up arenas or mechanisms for linking the communities’ different expressions and interests. The kind of organization that generates most identity and consciousness is one that works on everyone’s problems, not one that builds little islands. We need to invest both effort and resources in strengthening the communities’ endogenous capacities to resolve conflicts, recovering and combining ancestral forms with new negotiation techniques. Leaders shouldn’t be seen as people who “resolve everything,” no matter how many hats they wear at a time. Negotiation capacities with impartial attitudes need to be fostered.
It’s time to review what we’ve done and what we’re doing now in light of these and other findings and results. When the upper echelons of the current political regime are focused on sowing exclusion as a form of coexistence, when they use rewards and punishments to cut back freedoms and bend wills in exchange for perks, it’s also a good moment to review what has been done in order to reinvent ourselves. We can’t continue doing more of the same. The difference will come from breaking with it.

Silvio Prado is the current director of the Center for Political Studies and Analysis (CEAP), a former researcher with the Association for Survival and Local Development (ASODEL) and a member of the Network for Democracy and Local Development.

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