Understanding Local Government Coordination: An Assessment of District Coordination Committees in Nepal

Case Study: District Coordination Committees (DCCs)

Article 220 of the Constitution of Nepal envisions the formation of the District Assembly as the principal legislative body at the district level. The DCC is designated as the executive agency of the District Assembly. The Assembly is mandated to formulate legislation to cover the following four distinct yet interrelated functions: (i) horizontally coordinate amongst local governments in the specified territory; (ii) monitor the developmental programs to ensure developmental balance across municipalities; (iii) vertically coordinate between federal, provincial and local governments; and (iv) perform other tasks mandated as per the relevant provincial legislation (Government of Nepal 2017b, 105). The Assembly also has a role to elect the executive team of the DCC by making sure that representation of minorities, women, and Dalits (who are directly elected as ward members in rural and urban municipalities within the given territory) is guaranteed.

Although DCCs seem (of course, they are) entirely new institutions at the local level, previously established District Development Committees (DDCs) also featured a similar notion of coordination across municipalities in the given geographic territory. One of the similarities is the structure and election processes. The Local Self-Governance Act (1999) had clearly devised that DCCs would comprise between nine and fifteen elected members to be elected by electoral colleges. The distinctions, nevertheless, are straightforward: DDCs were established to work as authority of development planning (Adhikari 2006); the notion of coordination among local governments was merely on service delivery whereas modern day DCCs have much bigger scope encompassing political notion (Government of Nepal 1999); and, the DCCs are not empowered with taxation rights (Government of Nepal 2017b).

The analysis of constitutional provisions on DCCs helps us to construct a more detailed understanding of the structure and functions of DCCs. From the constitutional perspectives, the DCCs are highest level local government authorities with the role to vertically coordinate public policies amongst federal, provincial, and local governments as well as horizontally coordinate implementation programs amongst civil society organisations, private sector, and the local government entities. They are the highest level entity in the hierarchy of local governments because the organizational structure, roles and rights are speculated in the Constitution. To what extent DDCs can put themselves in the realm of highest level in the local government hierarchy largely depends upon the political leadership of the DCCs in the given district. As one vice-chair of a municipality expresses:

“… regardless of how much power DCCs have been given to, they are mere district-level political entities with no appropriate placement in the functioning of the local government system in the given territory.”

Despite this high status in the constitution, observational notes reveal three key contradictions: institutional placement, staffing arrangements, and functions. With the first one, the DCCs are constitutionally highest-level local government authorities in the district, putting the chiefs of DCCs as equivalent to the Secretary of the federal ministry in the portfolio ranking. However, the chiefs suffer from lack of resources and legal power – meaning that their portfolio ranking is useless. The second is how staffers in the DCC are appointed. All the local governments except the DCCs can hire their staffers through the provincial public service commission whereas the DCCs cannot do so. Instead, the federal government deploys staffers in the DCCs to run all the five key tasks outlined above. The final contradiction is related to the functions assigned to DCCs. On the one hand, the DCCs are established as highest level local governments in the district with constitutionally mandated roles and rights. On the other, provincial governments can promulgate legislation to assign roles and rights to the DCCs. This duality has created ambiguity in terms of DCC's accountability toward federal and provincial governments. Based on the prevailing Local Government Act (2017), the following three key functions of DCCs illustrate how horizontal coordination across local governments and vertical coordination among local, provincial, and federal governments are implemented.

Coordinating functions

Coordinating functions involve multiple actors in the local government process, in which the DCCs stand at the centre (Figure 1). On the top of the figure shows federal and provincial government entities with which DCCs are devised to maintain vertical coordination. Rest of the actors in the figure generally involve in producing horizontal coordination, though their role does not encompass only within the horizontal sphere in the local government process. Although local governments are placed at the bottom in the figure, the role of DCCs in coordinating amongst local governments remains very crucial. This happens especially when big projects are launched by provincial or federal government entities, and such projects aim to produce advantages to residents of multiple local governments. An observational note prepared for this research states:

“… the […] power project must offer their corporate social responsibility to the affected communities. These communities belong to more than two local government jurisdictions. The manager of the […] power company wishes representatives of both local governments to sit together to finalise the type of support to be covered from its corporate social responsibility fund. It took the company more than six months to initiate talks between two local governments to conclude the support package but couldn't finalise. Ultimately the chief of the [case study] DCC stepped in, brought all concerned parties to the negotiation table, and settled the support plan.”

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Figure 1.

Dimensions of vertical and horizontal coordination.

The coordinating role of DCCs encompass, as the quote above signals, horizontal coordination between civil society groups, private sector organisations and different levels of the government at the local level. The case study district runs 19 privately owned hydroelectricity power projects of which the corporate social responsibility fund is bigger than the sum of total capital budget of all the five local governments. The management of such funds in a coordinating manner is one of the most complex, conflicting, and stressful activities that the DCC in Rasuwa has been handling. With the formulation of coordination guidelines, the DCC is being able to mediate between different actors, including highly influential political leaders, to bring together all the actors in communities to solve the problems associated with the corporate social responsibility fund (District Coordination Committee 2019a). The guideline provides a legislative base for mediating between private-private sector, civil society and not-for-profit sectors, private sector and NGOs, among sub-municipal entities, and between government and non-government actors.

Definitional Ambiguities

The term ‘coordination’ has been found contested in terms of how it is understood at the local level. Although the constitution clearly outlines Nepal's federation as a cooperative federalism with the hope that all the 7 provinces and 753 local government entities coordinate in producing and implementing public policies, a group of ethnic activists and critics claim that each federal unit is independent from others hence ensuring coordination across jurisdiction is their internal definitional matter (Lawoti 2019). The legislative frameworks promulgated to implement Nepal's federalism also do not show much hope to define coordination in implementable manner (Government of Nepal 2017a; National Planning Commission 2021). Failure to recognise the complexity in defining the term has resulted in inter alia generating pessimism among politicians and bureaucrats who work as catalysts in ensuring coordination in policy making, implementation, and public service delivery at federal, provincial, and local level.

The definitional crisis of coordination seems to have its roots in decentralisation debates in the early years of 1980s, which brought ‘local autonomy’ as an inevitable component of devolution (Bienen et al. 1990). While the concept of local autonomy produced an enabling environment to exercise local democracy in Nepal, it did not adequately embrace the avenues for horizontal coordination among local governments at that time (Abullaish 1980). Reformers in the 1990s also focused on decentralising power and resources to local governments; yet, they seemed to have unnoticed the necessity to enlarge spaces for horizontal coordination (Government of Nepal 1999). The modern-day local governance in Nepal thus inherently brings coordination as a mere top-down notion of decentralisation, underestimating to address the needs of federal structures that must work both horizontally and vertically alike. A local politician says:

“… I had never heard this word coordination (Samanwoya in Nepali) throughout my 35 years of somewhat political life. After the introduction of DCC in our district, I am gradually realising the importance of coordinated policymaking across several jurisdictions as well as the role of federal, provincial and local governments in collectively implementing certain policies.”

This indicates that the notion of coordination at the local level is grounded in relatively weak foundations of local governance in Nepal, though the emergence of DCCs in the federal setting shows some hope after 2015. In absence of strict constitutional provision of the institutional design and modus operandi, all three levels of the government – federal, provincial, and local – are utilising DCCs according to their practical needs. At the horizontal level, local governments in a specified district come together in the District Assembly to deliberate the district-wide policy and programs. Obviously, not all deliberations produce local public policies that can be implemented jointly by concerned local governments; yet many local government officials find the Assembly as a common platform to share their views on certain policy or development programs in their locality. They perceive the institutional arrangement of the District Assembly as having the potential to (a) boost horizontal policymaking, (b) joint program implementation and (c) service delivery in given local governments. In scenarios where these three tasks of the District Assembly do not work, an additional function of information sharing which can be easily achievable through deliberation in the Assembly. Although the information does not always transmit top-down (from federal government to local governments) or bottom-up (from local governments to federal government) through DCCs, the activeness of the members of the District Assembly can certainly generate effective communication flow across jurisdictions, hence enhancing horizontal coordination.

Complexity of Horizontal and Vertical Coordination Mechanisms

The definitional crisis triggers to think of how complex the existing horizontal and vertical coordination local government mechanisms are in Nepal. Two contradictory aspects of such complexity are distinguished. The first aspect relates to the question of why local governments need coordination, given that the constitution devises them to operate in an unprecedentedly independent atmosphere. The constitutionally guaranteed resources, rights and responsibilities enable local governments to operate in autonomous (if not independent) status, though federal and provincial annual budgetary frameworks and sectoral policy guidelines affect their everyday activities (National Planning Commission 2018). Despite their power to generate revenue from within their geographic constituency, many – if not all – local governments need the support from provincial and federal government which compels them to value the notion of vertical coordination (National Natural Resources and Fiscal Commission 2019). In absence of clear legislative obligations, however, local governments do not need to horizontally coordinate with their neighbours. The DCCs come forward in such circumstances and try exploring the possible policy and programmatic avenues for horizontal coordination.

The second aspect of the complexity in local government coordination relates to the method of vertical and horizontal coordination. As indicated above, tools of vertical coordination appear to be top-down (rather than bottom-up). The institutions placed at federal and provincial level primarily aim to provide policy guidelines and budgetary support to local governments, though they do not undermine the notion of local autonomy devised in the constitution. Such linear placement of different levels of government in a vertical row, in turn, suggests that governments in the lower echelons need to follow the instructions given by the government in the upper tier. An informant representing Rasuwa district in the federal parliament states:

“… existing methods of vertical coordination provide the least space to flourish bottom-up coordination. The contradiction here is the question of whether local governments should accept the policy prescriptions or other budgetary conditions imposed by federal or provincial governments, given that the entire local governance regime in Nepal is designed as the third level of government.”

Dispersed Coordination Domains

Findings of this research suggest that local governments find difficulties in locating the domain for coordination. Five diverse domains have been observed where some form of involvement of the DCCs was inevitable to create and flourish both horizontal and vertical coordination (Figure 2). While these domains are not necessarily relevant to local governance coordination only, they have significant implications to the ways specific local governance coordination institutions, processes, mechanisms, and aspects are implemented.

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Figure 2.

Multiple domains of coordination.

The first domain consists of coordination between federal and provincial governments. The highest-level coordination mechanism between federal and provinces is the interprovincial council, which aims to strengthen coordination between federal and provincial governments. Although the council is of political type, its mandate to mediate between federal government and provincial governments may produce technocratic inputs to the way local governments formulate their annual and periodic policy and programs. Then comes another domain in which DCCs are placed with the hope that such mechanisms play key roles in bringing local, provincial, and federal government in a single domain. As has been noted throughout this article, the DCCs operate between provincial and local governments with clear constitutional mandate to mediate among local governments, between local governments and provincial governments, and between local governments and federal government.

The third domain comprises non-governmental actors including the private sector at the local level. The prevailing local governance act specifically aims local governments to mobilise and regulate these actors with the aim of inter alia avoiding overlap in their works. Although the classical literature on public governance does not always disfavours the idea of overlap and duplication (Ostrom, Tiebout and Warren 1961), reforms in modern-day public sector management aim at minimising duplication in the works of government (Halligan 2020). One problem with this specific task of local governments is that NGOs and big private sectors need to be registered by federal government which orients the accountability of such organisations toward federal institutions.

The fourth domain entails the notion of internal coordination among ward committees within a specific municipality. Bhusal (2020) notes that when multiple political parties represent in the municipal executive committee, the mayor becomes relatively weaker, and that such weakness can produce unpleasant coordination within its municipal decision-making. This research also confirms that ward committee chairs may discourage intra-municipal coordination if they contest with each other, specifically based on their political ideologies. In such circumstances, DCCs may get into the debates and try to bring conflicting ward committees to negotiate. Although different DCCs may have differing ideas in terms of whether they should intervene intra-municipal conflicts, the evidence produced in the Rasuwa district of Nepal suggests that horizontal coordination becomes more common when the DCCs initiate to develop consensus between the mainstream executive board of certain municipality and ward committees (District Coordination Committee 2019a).

The final domain can be traced at the intersectional space between DCCs and local governments. This domain seems to be the core of the entire coordination regime, with implications to both vertical and coordination mechanisms at the local level. In terms of vertical coordination, the federal government institutions situate at the top and ward committees remain at the bottom. Although municipalities do not necessarily go through the usual communication channel of DCCs to go upward to provincial and federal government entities, the DCCs play important yet less significant roles in mediating between local governments and governments above. However, when it comes to horizontal coordination at the local level (as Figure 1 above illustrates), the DCCs bring local actors in several common platforms such as the district-level annual review. Deliberation in common platforms such as the District Assembly produce both conventional and innovative avenues for local actors to work in coordinated manner (Bhusal and Breen 2021).

Policy Coordination or Coordination in Implementation?

One question was found ubiquitous in the implementation of local coordination mechanisms in Nepal: do local governments foster policy coordination, or they grossly aim to strengthen coordination in the implementation of local programs or projects? During the observation of two consecutive year's assemblies and review meetings, members of the assembly kept on recommending expanding horizontal policy coordination across the entire local governance regime in the Rasuwa district (rather than focusing on vertical coordination). While members of the DCCs and other outsiders prefer strengthening horizontal policy coordination, the insiders (mayors, deputy mayors and executives of municipalities) wish for coordination in the implementation of developmental programs. According to a chairperson of a municipality:

“… the notion of horizontal policy coordination can be tricky considering local government's constitutionally guaranteed autonomy. That is exactly why our team is in favour of coordination in the implementation of local development programs.”

This rather radical view is challenged by outsiders. A DCC member says:

“… when we ensure policy coordination, there grows the obvious possibility to create coordinated implementation of local government programs.”

The idea of policy coordination at the local level is officially stated in several statutory directives of the federal government – perhaps as guidelines (National Planning Commission 2018; Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration 2017). The local institutions and processes such as the participatory planning process follow such guidelines, though there remains the question of the degree to which they ensure policy coordination or aim to establish coordination in the implementation of local public policies (Bhusal and Pandeya 2021).

On the other hand, coordination in the implementation of developmental programs and projects also possesses two serious questions. First is the question of implementing agency: who will lead the implementation process should there appear chances to involve two or more than two municipalities in implementing developmental projects? Constitutionally all local governments are equal and remaining one's subordinate cannot be acceptable to the other. The DCCs could lead in such circumstances but they do not have implementation rights. The second question relates to accountability: which municipality is the ultimate agency to be accountable for results? This question is particularly important when projects fail to deliver expected outcomes.

Coordination or Collaboration?

Two competing narratives of local governance – collaboration and coordination – confuse local politicians and appointed officials alike. Although the prevailing local governance legislation loosely distinguishes these two narratives, there does not seem to be any specific implementation modality which would specify the collaboration and coordination roles of federal, provincial (including the DCCs) and local governments. In absence of legislative obligation, local governments generally seem reluctant to have collaborative projects with neighbouring municipalities. However, almost all municipalities in Nepal exhibit diverse forms of collaborative works that involve NGOs, CBOs, private sector along, of course, with provincial and federal government entities (Local Governance and Community Development Program 2008).

This is a significant policy gap which is sought to be solved through coordination mechanisms. Many local governance programs launched by the federal government suggest having coordination amongst the most relevant entities at federal, provincial, and local level (Provincial and Local Governance Support Program 2019). Provincial ministries aim to involve more than one municipality to implement their programs, though local governments are not always devolved with leadership authority in such programs. In the Bagmati province where the case study district is located, provincial ministries are found to entrust the DCCs to lead certain crosscutting programs such as the capacity development programs to implement at the local level. This trade-off between coordination and collaboration has resulted in nothing but a state of confusion about when, how and who should work together in local policymaking and implementation.

When there is clear absence of adequate local collaborative projects that bring neighbouring municipalities together, the question of horizontal coordination becomes more contested. This research is unable to find an exact answer to this question but provides insights on how coordination initiatives – mostly led by the DCCs at the local level – can drive the future of local governance toward collaborative governance. Yet, much hope can be frustrating because the DCCs lack (a) basic resources to be proactive in fostering collaborative efforts, and (b) necessary legislative right to present themselves as the key authorities to strengthen collaborative governance at the local level.