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educational materials; dissemination through professional meetings, etc. |
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A small but none the less important point relating to collection of past experience is the need to fund it fully. This means paying the people being interviewed as well as the interviewers! There is no doubt that in the past, while the academic community has published extensively (often as a condition of the research grant supporting the investigation), consultants have been much more reticent (because they are not paid for publishing, and tend to finish one assignment and move straight on to the next one), as have developing country specialists (because of language barriers or lack of access to editors of journals). Providing stipends for people who have vital operational information, so that they may either record it themselves or pass it on to interviewers, is therefore important. |
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It is interesting that almost no one at the Conference mentioned the need for evaluation of the institutional framework within which these projects have been undertaken. This obviously needs to be done as part of the fieldwork in steps 1 to 4 above, but it can probably be given less immediate emphasis during the next steps. It perhaps appeared that people felt that present fashion is maybe to focus too much on the 'soft' side of projects, while glossing over technical matters, leading to technical problems later (of course, the Conference was essentially a meeting of engineers . . . ). At any rate, agreement on the precise technical recommendations appears to be a precondition to any widespread use of the techniques; once the technical aspects are clearly understood, then the development of projectspecific institutional arrangements can follow. These will almost certainly include some new types of partnerships, in which responsibility for design, implementation, management, and operation and maintenance is allocated between different types of institution [sector agency, private sector enterprise, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the community affected]. Financial mechanisms will also have to be tailored to local circumstances (and will need to include household costs as well as municipal ones). |
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This research effort (steps 1 through 5 above) would probably take at least 2 years. The brief discussions at the Conference did not lead to any agreement on the ideal mechanism for carrying it |
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