Community Barriers of Sustainable

Development in Rural Egypt
 

Mohamed Nabil Gamie

Summary and Conclusions: Because of historic oppressive and exploitative governance in Egypt, it has been hypothesized that development has not been an old historic phenomenon, but when it was recently born particularly in the twentieth century it was only a government venture. It is thus hypothesized that the imbalance between government and public’s and private participation in development in favor of government is the major cause of village underdevelopment in Egypt.

The findings of a sample study of 257 villages in Egypt illustrate the salience of social and cultural variables in shaping community level of development. Existence and efficiency of organizations in Egypt ranked at the top of predictors with regard to direct causal effect on village development level. These organizations include the local governance unit, the social unit including a government directed community development association, village bank, schools, mosques and churches, agricultural cooperative, veterinary unit, youth and women associations (also governmentally directed), health units or village hospital, police unit (security organization), … etc. A very small indirect effect is also played by these organizations through their being a small part of a complex, titled here, “social engineering, or social technology.” Such complex includes, in addition to the above mentioned organizations, the degree of organizational coordination, proportion of population employed in village organizations and degree of organizational variety.

Organizational coordination implies collective action, cooperation, support, mutual help and positive cooperative attitudes among the leaders of village organizations existing in the local community, between community organizations and others existing in the neighboring communities and between village organizations and corresponding head branches in county seats and capitals of governorates. The “technology of coordination,” as sometimes called by some, seems to be the crux of social technology. The problem of lack of coordination is widely recognized by executives and policy makers, but effective implementation is often lacking.  

The third ranking development determinant is community feeling of governmental justice. Feeling of justice is strongly supported by this study as a driving force for public and organizational involvement in village development. Adequacy of infrastructure is also a significant determinant for viable village development. This variable, in addition to material technology, represent the material predictors of community level of development. In addition to agricultural mechanization and existence of local industries, the implementation of certain practices such as land reclamation, maintenance of irrigation and drainage networks, fish growing in secondary water channels and rice fields, floriculture, sprinkling irrigation, use of biogas, multiple cropping .. etc. represent material technologies. The findings, however, illustrate that socio-cultural variables are really the dominant predictors of village level of development.

The role of degree of religiosity, density of university graduates settling in the community and degree of people’s community involvement still illustrate the dominance of socio-cultural variables in shaping community viability and development in rural Egypt. The findings, thus, lend support to the Durkheimian school of realism and neo-realism. Nominalistic orientations such as those of McClelland, Hagen and Lerner, unless their claimed psychic characters trigger powerfully coercive social forces, seem to have little support by this study.

Operational definitions of development and the dynamics of development determinants are culturally bound, and should be tailored locally. In other words, the agenda for sustainable development in Hamilton-Wentworth, Canada, for example, is not necessarily the same as that of a small village in Egypt. This does not negate attempts at development theory construction for the pursuit of a general theory of development.

At the macro-level of Egyptian policy making, we find "enormous failure to conceptualize sustainable development" "as something different from the former modernization strategy, " using the terms of van Brockhuizen and van der Ploeg (1993). Freedom, democracy, popular initiative and participation, decentralization, human and environmental values, local governance rather than just local administration, and adoption of the socio-cultural perspective of development rather than just the material and economic perspective, all compose the indispensable basic philosophy of sustainable development. Adoption of this philosophy by strategic policy makers is strongly recommended. The latest adoption of privatization and market economy principles in Egypt, i.e., economic structural adjustment, gives hope for a similar and concomitant socio-cultural structural adjustment. Only then, sustainable development can take off. Social scientists are partly responsible for the creation of this consciousness and for the initiation and propagation of this transition.

In conclusion, it seems that democratization and decentralization represent the basic challenges facing the Egyptian government today for augmenting social technology, sustainable development and achieving the standards of modern countries. Several key challenges must be addressed, i.e., the centralist mentality of the status quo, weak state and modest local human capital capacities, financial viability of the newly created local governments, finding the proper size of local government, and overcoming citizen’s apathy. However, proper transformation should be cautiously pursued, other wise not only decentralization will be harmed but the whole ethics of democracy and liberalism.