Efficient and Strategic Resource Allocation for Sustainable Development in Jordan

Hanin I. Shuqair¹ and Dania M Abdel-Aziz^2*

¹Department of Architectural Engineering, Al-Zaytoonah University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan

²Department of Architectural Engineering, Al-Zarqa University, Al-Zarqa, Jordan

*Corresponding Author:

Dania M. Abdel-Aziz
Lecturer, Department of
Architectural Engineering
Al-Zarqa University, Jordan
E-mail: archdania.aziz@gmail.com

Received Date: November 20, 2014 Accepted Date: April 17, 2015 Published Date: April 27, 2015

Citation: Shuqair HI, Abdel-Aziz DM (2015) Efficient and Strategic Resource Allocation for Sustainable Development in Jordan. J Archit Eng Tech 4:138. doi:10.4172/2168-9717.1000138

Copyright: © 2015 Shuqair HI, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Abstract

This research addresses a modern-day major topic; sustainability, and although it is in fact a very vast and wide topic and on every tongue at current times, some aspects of it seem to be left with little exploration in comparison to the other aspects, such as resource allocation. Mainly, this research will go into the importance of resource allocation for sustainable development, with emphasis on infrastructure, financial, human and information resources, and it will address topic related questions, questions like: how much effect has resource allocation on sustainable place promotion? And is it possible to allocate resources on the basis of any priority structure? And most of all, what can we do in Jordan to improve allocation of resources to achieve the desired integrated and long term development. The results basically highlight incorporating the public for achieving equitable resource allocation, and its dependence on concepts of having a priority system not hierarchy for the process of allocation, planning with objectives and introducing new adaptable global concepts to alleviate the current resource allocation condition in Jordan. This research basically recommends that resources should be allocated according to the priorities and objectives concept, objectives that are predetermined and integrated with a holistic vision of how development should be in a certain area, facilitated by a proper national agenda. Also, these priorities and objectives should always be determined according to the locals in the concerned area, and in a way that is environmentally considerate, socially integrated and economically strengthening.

Keywords

External and internal resources; Decentralization; Community involvement; Resource allocation According to priorities; Accountability; Equally shared benefits

Introduction

Literature review

Global changes in governance: The design of many recent development modalities, especially in the developing countries, has been influenced by the radical changes taking place in the global political environment which are almost unprecedented in history. Democratic governments and market-based economic systems have replaced authoritarian and statist regimes in a significant number of countries during the past 10 years [1].

"The current level of interest in decentralization is clear and in a way that out of 75 developing and transitional countries with populations greater than 5 million, all but 12 claim to have embarked on some form of transfer of political power to local units of government" as declared by the UNDP publications.

Central governments are now allocating more substantial portions of the national budget to local authorities and donor agencies are more willing to directly provide support to local authorities. This trend is coupled with the magnified interest in the role of NGOs and other elements of the civil society in providing improved mechanisms for targeting disadvantaged groups. The private sector is also seen less as an institution antithetical to public economies and more as a partner for governments seeking innovative ways to improve service delivery. It can be argued that all these developments are likely to considerably enlarge the scope for overcoming some of the major factors that undermined earlier development efforts and to improve the prospects for sustaining development initiatives once they have been established.

Decentralization for sustainable human development

Decentralization process in Jordan: During the past few years, Jordan moved towards a more decentralized scheme and this led to changes in the multi-layered systems at both the national and local government levels. One important reason for adapting this new to Jordan concept is to improve the efficiency and responsiveness to community development.

This new concept of decentralization is based on the "partial" transference of deliberative, legislative, executive and administrative powers to the local governments; this is the case in most areas of the country except for the Jordan Valley Authority JVA and Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority ASEZA and a few smaller locations which happen to have been assigned to a greater level of authority due to special factors concerning them such as their geographical locations or economic potentials.

Municipalities or local governments are known to be the engine for the provision of resources and implementing the central government’s development decisions in their territories as they are providers of social services such as health, education, roads, etc. The responsibility of equitable distribution of resources is the municipalities' sole task because they are closer to local communities’ needs and municipal councils are elected from their communities. The closeness of these councils to their local communities makes them realize the needs and aspirations of their communities better than the central government. Thus, these councils are urged to implement the local policies successfully so that socioeconomic improvement is felt by local communities [2].

The approach towards decentralization allows for the local governments, represented in the governorates and the special authority zones, to insure that the local prolific resources and the gains of economic growth and welfare are distributed more fairly and equitably among citizens, in a way that both supports future economic development and protects the natural resources, and even exceeds that to become an obligation.

If we go back to the structure behind this approach, one can easily find that it is based on both bottom-up and top-down approaches to the decentralization framework. On one hand, local governments have more power in administration, more authority to decide upon local priorities to be dealt with, and influence budget related issues among others, grassroots, collaborative planning and community participation concepts are introduced in the planning methodology. On the other hand, power is not completely handed over to the local governments; an active top-down central system acts as the ultimate organizing reference for all related local governments [3].

Again, when emphasizing on the importance of allocating resources properly, it has been widely argued that equitable resource distribution is a major contributor to people`s lives. Apart of course from impacting directly on living standards, equitable resource distribution also tends to enhance economic growth. A system in which resources are not equitably allocated is simply inefficient, inefficiency in turn leads to price distortions and corruption, it leads to social segregation, economic monopoly and instability and people trying to find alternate income resources by invading natural territories, and more widens the gap between citizens and their governments by reducing people`s trust in their governments` capabilities to provide them with good living conditions.

What is resource allocation: Resource allocation is central to all development processes and in all fields, as discussed above; therefore, the issues of the proper understanding and documentation of it is important for the policy makers to focus on to enable them to prioritize problems for the common man's welfare and providing basic necessities especially in the less developed areas of the country. It is crucial to use proper resource allocation approaches according to the available budget and available local resources to support the areas of a country in a way to achieve long-term development with a future vision of becoming self-sustained. This better understanding is what this section is paving the way for.

Resource allocation as a discipline or even as a process can be defined in its simplest form as "The process of dividing up and distributing available, limited resources to competing, alternative uses that satisfy unlimited wants and needs". Given that world is rampant with scarcity (unlimited wants and needs, but limited resources), every want and need cannot be satisfied with the available resources. Choices have to be made. Some wants and needs are satisfied, some are not. These choices, these decisions are the resource allocation process. An efficient resource allocation exists if society has achieved the highest possible level of satisfaction of wants and needs from the available resources and resources cannot be allocated differently to achieve any greater satisfaction [4].

These resources in general can take the form of financial resources, human resources, material and equipment’s needed to achieve a certain goal and finally infrastructure facilities needed to develop a certain area [5,6].

Proper resource allocation since it is a central contributor to sustainable development, has to be cared for, this can be better understood through explaining the main factors of sustainable development and the resulting conflicts between them, basically the ''Resource and Development Conflicts'' (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The triangle of conflicting goals of planning.

From the globally agreed upon definition of sustainable development; "Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." one can note that it involves meeting the needs of the poor and limiting damage to the environment that would compromise its ability to support future generations. In an economic context, sustainable development requires societies to allocate resources in such a way that meets the needs of the poor and minimizes environmental damage [7].

According to Campbell's Triangle above; social justice and equity lie at the head of sustainable development, therefore, again, an important function of governance is to share benefits of growth and resources fairly among citizens [8,9].

Conflicts over what we want our local environments (social environment, natural and economic environments) to be like are a routine part of a planner`s experience. If a planner is not actively concerned with the potential impacts of a new project in a neighborhood, city or region, he and the involved actors actually hear of such conflicts through the locals themselves, may it be through street gossip, through the newspapers, television programs and others. Through this awareness planners have come to understand the impact of actions on conditions in other places, and how important it is to allocate any resources from physical infrastructure resources such as schools for example to the accompanying financing and qualified labor in respect to the local environment. In all decisions and actions on so many levels, a planner, decision maker and the different actors have to fear the harm that they do to both society and the environment [10].

Resource allocation in Jordan: Awamleh in 1994 conducted an analysis of capital budgeting for the local councils in Jordan, his study aimed at trying to analyze the spending programs for both the municipal and village councils [11]. This study analyzed the sources of funding that these councils depend on and he tried to link these spending programs to the funding resources trying to identify the local fiscal policy.

Awamleh, found that the local service projects depended largely on self-financing rather than external financing resources, while capital and productive projects relied on the external resources.

One very important finding of Awamleh`s study was that he noticed a variation between major municipalities and the smaller municipalities in the individual allocation of resources, the study stated that the municipal councils received 95% of the external allocation of capital projects, while village councils received only 5% of capital projects [12].

Mraiyan in 1988 analyzed the economic disparities among the governorates of Jordan through studying the budgets of major municipalities. The study concluded that the regional planning approach should deal with the profound allocation and redistribution of economic activities as a solution for reducing disparities among the various governorates of Jordan [13], and for improving the livelihood standards for the Jordanians.

"The case in the Western World is different; municipalities tend to apply techniques of decision support systems such as Geographic Information System (GIS) in estimating justice among the municipalities’ districts; they use GIS accessibility based models as a tools for optimal resource allocation" [14]. GIS is not the solution for allocating resources properly, it is no more than a helping tool, this process actually goes much deeper, Jordan is a new country to the concept of planning in comparison to many other countries who have a whole history of planning experience and therefore developed more suitable and tailor made methods for each individual governing system to allocate resources.

Jordan has to benefit from what other countries have achieved so far mainly from their own trial and error processes, concerning the new methodologies and concepts of planning for sustainability and resource allocation, because in the end Jordan will not re-invent the wheel, but it has to find a way to integrate between these methodologies and the local (individual) state of the country to sustain the wanted integrated, tailor made and therefore sustainable development.

The review above, general in nature, does not address the questions of this research specifically, it is used as an indicator, that the general findings and discussions of this research paper are expected to raise questions and interest for both the directly active planning and decision making actors and the local citizens who are not so very aware of their responsibilities and possibilities.

Challenges to resource allocation

Significance of research, focus and purpose: This research aims at raising the awareness on the importance of the topic; resource allocation. It talks generally about ways to achieve strategic resource allocation that result in achieving more sustainable growth with a focus on the less developed areas and allows for local resources to be developed and allocated more efficiently, always in relation to Jordan. It provides a more general view of the current status of allocating resources in planning; it raises questions and provides advice for people who are interested in the topic.

For example, many acts of resource allocations that lead to unsustainable, superficial and even segregated development are based on the instantaneously dealing with popping up issues and problems and major investments mostly with preconditions "which is a case we often witness in Jordan", not even mentioning corruption and nepotism. These are incremental actions, actions without "planning" that lead to the misuse of the existing and always insufficient budget and the development being temporary, probably environmentally unconsidered and most definitely not sharing the common good equally between all related actors (this research considers local citizens as a part of the actors). This research takes such examples and discusses it in relation to similar case studies, and tries to point out where things go wrong and what the preferable solution might be.

This research also explores how allocating the existing resources according to priorities, goals and objectives is one way for supporting sustainable place promotion, if not the most significant way [15] Studies show that this in fact is not a new concept to planning in Jordan, as Al-Dabbas`s study in 1986 indicated that the revenues of local municipalities should be in fact spent according to the priority principle [16], still it is still a very raw idea, even decades later.

As this research paper goes over many resource allocation related problems and ideas, it aims at explaining the following:

–– The role of efficient resource allocation in sustainable place promotion.

–– How to achieve sustainable resource allocation, especially through the involvement of citizens.

–– The impact of efficient resource allocation on the sustainable growth of less developed areas, and its effect on their local resources.

–– Priority and objective based resource allocation.

–– The importance of having a national agenda for Jordan in order to enable the proper allocation of resources.

–– Discussing some new competition based resource allocation techniques that are widely spread in western countries and the ability to implement them locally in Jordan.

Overview of what is contained in the research`s various sections

This research is structured into 5 main sections, the above sections I and II represent the introductive data required for this research, section III outlines the methodology with 3 different case studies representing specific issues related to the topic of research, one case study goes over resource allocation in the Jordanian municipalities and aims at providing a more technical and realistic perspective on the topic, the second case study describes how decentralization in the governing systems can affect the processes of resource allocation and the third case study presents a model from the western world on how resources should actually be allocated. In section IV the general outcomes of this research paper are assessed in relation to the current situation in Jordan, in section V the final conclusions and recommendations are presented.

Materials and Methods

Case studies

In general and as an introduction to this section; "A case is studied when it itself is of very special interest, the detail of interaction with its surrounding contexts is what is looked for. Case study is the study of the particularity and complexity of a single case, coming to understand its activity within important circumstances" [5] (Table 1).

Table 1: Research Case Study Methods and Procedures.

Case study (1)

Resource Allocation Efficiency in the Jordanian Municipalities, (Greater Irbid Municipality Study): This is a very specific study aiming at measuring the efficiency of allocating resources with the example of the transportation network infrastructure in The Greater Irbid Municipality, located in the northern part of Jordan. Even if the example in this case study appears to be less relevant than other crucial current issues, it provides a good basis for understanding the dimensions of the resource allocation system in Jordan and it provides a more practical aspect for the topic [12] (Figure 2)

Figure 2: Greater Irbid Municipality Districts. Source: Journal of Geography and Regional Planning.

One of the most important issues discussed in this study is the urgent need for applying the principle of "Priorities Identification" for the optimum resource allocation that meets the local development needs, if only on a municipal level.

As a methodology, this study tries to give an understanding on how to allocate road services between the 7 sub-districts of the Greater Irbid Municipality in an optimum way to achieve the best results wanted, and then compares the optimum solution with the actual actions of the municipality trying to find where the critical gaps may lie.

The results of this study can be summoned up into emphasizing on the importance of criteria in the resource allocation processes in the Jordanian municipalities. According to the study, the Greater Municipality of Irbid adopted the following criteria for the purpose of resource allocation:

1. Population Density: "The more population density in the area, the higher the priority scores".

2. Number of Housing units in the Area: "The more houses, the higher the priority scores".

3. Traffic volume: "The more traffic volume, the higher the priority scores".

4. Intersections with a high incidence of road accidents: "The more intersections with high incidence of accidents, the higher the priority scores".

5. District’s delivery of services: "The more services provided by the district, the higher the priority scores".

Each of the above mentioned criteria is given a percentage weight according to its importance in determining the priorities for the resource allocation and according to the resulting priorities municipal funds are supposed to be allocated.

As a result, it was found that the actual financial resources were assigned to municipality districts in a way that is not according to the actual studied priorities (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Optimal and Actual distribution of resources for roads sector among the municipality’s districts.

The truth is that the district with the highest priority was given much less than other districts which came after according to their prioritizing, something lead that the concept of depending on priority to allocate resources was present but not implemented.

This study also revealed that the practice of setting priorities to allocate resources accordingly is not a part of the municipalities` practice; it was found that it was actually an individual initiative in the municipality and not an institutionalized practice.

"The above findings as regards resource allocation for the roads’ sector in Greater Irbid Municipality illustrate very clearly that other factors are at play in the process of the actual implementation of resource allocation. These factors could be represented in the influence of the residents and businessmen “elites” in some districts. Though the study did not investigate the existence of corruption and its influence on the resource allocation mechanism, corruption could have had some influence."

The case in the Greater Irbid Municipality demonstrates that instead of the resources being allocated in the optimal way, they were not, and this in turn will lead to the increase in disparities among these districts, disturb the well being of locals and also waste valuable resources. Strict changes and policies for these governmental bodies have to be introduced to achieve a more balanced growth.

Case Study (2)

Shared growth in Ghana`s district assemblies system: The experience of Ghana indicates that poverty is well pronounced in the rural areas where over 60% of the population lives, this case reflects an important fact about developing countries in the 21st century, including Jordan. In these countries in particular, rural areas are often neglected, most areas in these countries see themselves as underprivileged in comparison to the few economically dominant major cities such as capital cities for example [3].

Resources (whether financial, infrastructure, human…etc.) are often allocated in favor of these already established cities as running costs, maintenance and new projects. Governments would rather invest their limited resources on what seems to provide most profit back and is less risky, which is understandable, but the truth is that neglecting these rural areas on a long run will lead to a state of imbalance between the different areas of a country. This imbalance will cause many unthought-of side effects to come to surface, problems such as mass migration of people from the countryside to the cities trying to find better jobs, or citizens of these neglected areas as they suffer from bad living conditions and lack of good job opportunities try to find substitute income resources whether by social criminality or misusing their natural environments, cutting protected trees to sell as fire wood for example, and much more.

It is against this background that the government of Ghana has for the "past two decades" implemented several pro-poor policies, mainly, the current Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS) policy along with other related programs and funds. The case study relates the achievement of long term sustainability of the policies to a broad range of stakeholders all who are concerned about and committed to fighting poverty towards lasting results.

Realizing this, Ghana, a country moving on to a decentralization scheme since the 1980s, established the concept of the District Assemblies (DAs) at the local government level, with the main goal to improve efficiency and responsiveness to community development.

The District Assembly is considered to be the basic unit of local government and it is supposed to be the highest political authority in the district with various powers. These 4 districts are responsible for involving local people and other partners at the local level in decision making and ensuring that community views are taken into account through participatory democracy. More so, district assemblies are to ensure that the productive resources and gains of economic growth are distributed equitably and fairly.

These district assemblies were initially supposed to rely on bottomup approaches in planning and implementing projects as a way to achieve the best resource distribution possible, but due to the nature of the governing system of the country a hybrid solution of a combination of both top-down and bottom-up approaches was utilized, probably as a first step this the optimum solution.

One of the essential points in this case study in particular is that these district assemblies aim at utilizing the wide range of resources available within the district itself to improve living standards as well as meeting central government expectations. The districts are more aware of their capabilities and needs, and therefore should be handed the power to decide upon the resources and their allocation. This issue of course requires building the capacity and accountability of the responsible districts; otherwise no improvement will be achieved.

The main actors in the districts` administration framework constitute democratically elected representatives from the citizens, government nominated members and career civil service personnel who are all involved in a sort of mixed relationships. Clearly, mechanisms put in place for administration at the district level are designed to facilitate grassroots participation in decision-making and development planning. This way it is believed the efficiency of the DAs would improve thereby making it more responsive to the desires and needs of the local residents.

District assemblies perform the following major functions:

1. Planning, each district is responsible for coming up with a focused plan that outlines the strategic approaches to meet the development needs for the entire district, also for implementing these plans all within the framework of the national plan.

2. Organizing, organizing both material and human resource is an important managerial function of a district assembly.

3. Coordinating, this involves identifying opportunities for cooperation and collaboration among actors within the district assembly itself as well as important institutions outside it.

4. Resource allocation, linked to planning and coordination is the issue of allocating resources from both government and nongovernment sources. In the current district assembly system, the power to allocate resources transfers an important responsibility to grassroots participation to ensure equity. However, these issues are best thought about in practical terms. Funds from the central government for example may be categorized whilst those from nongovernment sources may not be categorized.

Case Study (3)

Regions active program, shaping rural futures, Germany: The Active Regions Program model will be discussed briefly only as an example of what planners and citizens of Jordan should be thinking of for their own future years ahead from now, this study will provide basics for what to do starting from now to prepare for a better future [17].

Regions active is a program based on the idea of competition for financial resources between self-proclaimed regions in the rural areas of Germany, each self-defined region (by the locals themselves) has to come-up with a development plan for the regions under many conditions such as the obligation of involving the locals in this process, mainly through representatives, the condition to develop plans on a sustainable basis even if on a very small scale, plans that are integrated in the region itself and between the different regions if needed (Figure 4).

Figure 4: The 18 Winning Districts of Regions Active. Source: Elbe, Sebastian Regions Active Presentation.

The winning regions receive an amount of money from the federal government to develop their initial plans into advanced ones through hiring planners or whatever they may find useful and then go through another round of elimination to select the few final winners. Out of the 208 initial self-defined regions, 33 were found to have plans with high possibilities and were granted money to develop their work and in the end only 18 won and received the final funds to start the implementation.

Planning by objectives is what we can conclude from this study, clear objectives lead to a higher rate of development success. By properly planning the development objectives, the tasks leading towards these objectives are easily created. If a sailor knows where the fish are, he can direct his boat to the proper spot. Development planning is no different.

This is one issue that the Jordanian government can learn from and adapt, as mentioned before, many planning and therefore resource allocations in the country are incremental procedures, with no clear holistic vision for the whole country, where all efforts take part in realizing one ultimate national objective and then is broken down into several integrated local goals.

Expert interviews

Expert interviews are important to the methodology of this research paper, they provide data that is not available in any case study, due to the lack of research in the specific topic of research in the Jordanian governing system.

In a situation in which you will not get more than one chance to interview someone, as it is the case with interviewing most experts in the different fields, semi-structured interviewing is best. It has much of the freewheeling quality but it is based on using an interview guide. This is a written list of questions and topics that need to be covered in a particular order1 (Table 2).

Table 2: Research Interviewing Methods and Procedures.

Results

This research led to some outcomes that are tackled in this section of the paper, these results can be put as follows:

a. Achieving equitable resource distribution depends entirely on incorporating the public in the decision making concerning the process of allocation. Take the district assemblies concept in Ghana as an example. This incorporation allows for the external resources in all their forms to be integrated specifically where they are needed to insure best results, and allows the local resources to be detected and maybe slowly integrated to substitute any external intervention.

b. Resource allocation according to priority; the process of resource allocation should be based on basic standardized criteria, clarifying the relative importance and urgency of development needs among sub areas, such as the municipalities in Jordan.

Resource allocation by the concerned governmental and NGOs should be planned for, the positive and negative impacts should be forecasted in advance, and such decisions should be publicized through media and be open to the public.

c. Resource Allocation with objectives; objectives set the direction that has to be followed in order to achieve a specific sort of development, here comes the importance of having regional and national plans (the national plan for Jordan is still being worked on, as the first national agenda ever in the history of the country) as ways to express these objectives and smaller goals in different spans of time, long term, middle and short term.

d. Improving resource allocation through concepts of competition; as a way of bringing people together, including the different governmental officials, and push them to work together for a higher purpose, assisting them in identifying different ways to approach an in common problem and deciding upon themselves on the best proposed solutions.

Competition is a way of motivating people to take action, and get involved physically and emotionally in what concerns their wellbeing and their environments.

e. Effects of resource allocation on the economy and the environment; these effects can be positive or negative ones. These effects depend on how locally integrated and tailor made development is, and again, with long term perspective.

Final Discussion and Recommendations

It is clear that Jordan is a country new to the concept of planning in comparison to other countries, and although planning was introduced to the Jordanian system in the 1950s, it is still struggling with the issue of resource allocation, this is an issue pointed out by the Ministry of Social Development in the year 2000, according to the ministry local citizens begin to request an equitable distribution of services among the various areas in the country, because despite the understanding of government officials of the equitable distribution of resources, the gap is still clear between Amman, the capital, and other cities in the country.

One first step towards this wanted efficiency in Jordan is starting right at the local level by building the capacity of locals to enable them to participate in decisions that affect them, which is something that people in the country are not really used. A new mentality has to rise, the mentality of people having an influence in decisions and development that affect their lives.

Building the capacity of the municipalities comes in parallel to introduce policies that empower locals and systems that are qualified to produce proper resource allocation criteria, all this with the enforcement of the financial monitoring while the municipalities implement their plans through checking and validating the resources allocated and the actual implementation.

As one solution, this research suggests benefiting from the district assembly system in Ghana, perhaps the 3 declared regions of Jordan (north, middle and south regions) can be adapted in a way that responds to the concept. Why? These are areas with common characteristics, interests and needs and probably transferring some power to these regions in a phased way through general councils elected from locals will result in both, people becoming more aware of their problems and possibilities and better allocation for resources is achieved.

This research recommends that resources allocation has to be facilitated by a proper national agenda, the national agenda is an important document in determining priorities for efficient resource allocation, because of the possibility to predict and work according to the medium and long term development plans from the very beginning and in a phased way where continuous evaluation is possible for the so far accomplished development. So, the expected national agenda for Jordan should consider this from the very start.

One last important recommendation is that we should not depend on external resource allocations for sustainable development; we should find internal possibilities, even if it means that this will be a very time consuming process, it needs for these resources to be identified first, then strengthened and protected, then incorporated into sustainability supporting and tailor made strategies.

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