These are the questions we set out to answer through the formation of the McKinley County Public Partnership under grant funding from The Ford Foundation to the State of New Mexico's Local Government Division.
In 1994, in collaboration with New Mexico's seven regional councils, the State's Local Government Division approached The Ford Foundation's Public Sector Initiative office with a proposal to support a unique state-region-county-local partnership to promote rural development. The Foundation was responsive to the idea and awarded a two-year $130,000 grant to the State of New Mexico for this purpose. On the ground, this new resource included competitively awarded subgrants of $50,000 (later augmented) to each of two regional councils: the Eastern Plains Council of Governments (COG) headquartered in Clovis; and the Northwest New Mexico COG headquartered in Gallup. The COGs in turn consulted with the county governments in their respective regions to engage the interest of a pilot county in implementing a rural partnership initiative. In the Eastern Plains, Quay County volunteered, and in northwest New Mexico, McKinley County joined up.
In northwest New Mexico, the opportunity provided by the Ford grant had long been anticipated. The region's socio-economic statistics have consistently ranked in the bottom percentiles both statewide and nationally. A complex array of jurisdictional, political, social policy, ethnosocial and geographic barriers have threatened to maintain this condition in a state of perpetual status quo. Over an expanse of 15,000 square miles, the area is populated by a diverse range of cultures. Native Americans (with Navajo as the largest tribal population) comprise 50 percent of the region's 200,000 people, while representing over 80 percent of the statistics of social and economic distress.
In search of new approaches and breakthroughs to the impasse, the Northwest New Mexico COG had been working to design, fund and implement a broad, proactive strategy known as the Rural Development Initiative (RDI). The primary objectives of the RDI were to reduce fiscal and programmatic fragmentation in the delivery of development services, to establish accountability systems for attaining measurable results (now called "benchmarking"), and to coordinate and expand upon existing development resources through comprehensive and collaborative approaches.
Several paths were pursued to promote the RDI agenda, most prominently the strategic plan produced for the Federal Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community (EZ/EC) initiative. This effort encountered Federal regulations unfavorable to the region due to the exclusion of Indian lands from the EZ/EC program, and thus did not achieve full success. However, on the strength of the strategic plan, USDA subsequently designated the area as a "Champion Community". Though unfunded, this collaborative effort has begun to produce results, including formation in 1995 of the Northwest New Mexico Community Development Corporation, a regional nonprofit subsidiary of the COG.
The Ford Foundation/State of New Mexico partnership grant offered new resources and technical support to the RDI effort. With this support, the region began to pursue innovative relationships and strategies to identify and solve persistent problems of development in the rural communities surrounding Gallup, New Mexico. The "problem" was seen to be composed of three inter-related components: (a) the clear and chronic condition of socioeconomic distress under which many of the area's rural communities struggle; (b) the difficulty experienced by rural communities in accessing and controlling development resources; and (c) the generalized fragmentation and ineffectiveness of institutional leadership in addressing and solving the socioeconomic and resource issues at hand.
An initial driving force behind New Mexico's Ford Partnership planning process was the desire by State Government and the participating regional councils to make a difference in rural New Mexico (a) through achieving breakthroughs in linking local needs with development resources and (b) through forging new and more intimate working relationships with selected County governments and rural communities. At the local level, the objective was to create new relationships between unincorporated rural communities and County Government. The rural communities in northwest New Mexico -- some of them political subdivisions (i.e., "Chapters") of the Navajo Nation and some of them unincorporated communities lying outside the Reservation -- expressed frustration over the difficulties involved in accessing Tribal, State and County resources to meet local infrastructure, housing and other development needs. On the other hand, County Government was concerned about how to respond to the many requests for assistance coming in from these rural communities and how to work all of the needs into an integrated development plan for the County. These mutual motivations helped form the basis for the McKinley County Public Partnership.
Figure A; McKinley County Public Partnership
A principal mechanism for building the collaborative strength of the Partnership was the "Coordinating Council", to be composed of representatives from each of the participating rural communities, from the County, and from the COG. The State Local Government Division office and the Advisory Committee would participate and provide technical assistance to the Council.
In terms of the organizational nature and capacity of the Council of Governments and its embryonic Community Development Corporation, it became clear that there was a need for technical assistance in the arena of organizational development, i.e., the structuring of the CDC to appropriately tap and manage the resources needed for the Rural Development Initiative to succeed. To be successful, the Partnership would need to address this evolving role of the COG.
From the viewpoint of the individual rural communities, particularly those on Indian reservations, challenges and obstacles facing development efforts are unique and substantial. Physical, social and institutional infrastructure development has lagged far behind advances in urbanized communities. Diffuse population patterns undermine the achievement of economies of scale in creating new infrastructure and in attracting resources for development and services. Rural-urban and Indian-Anglo differences in cultural, political, and technological orientation further exacerbate the challenge.
While the influx of Federal dollars into tribal communities and organizations in the past few decades has been in the hundreds of millions, these resources have failed for the most part to leverage or create sustainable, productive economies in those communities. Even in communities whose efforts have succeeded in tapping disproportionate levels of Federal funding (such as the quasi-independent Ramah Navajo community southeast of Gallup), there are indeed visible improvements and enhancements in the form of roads, public facilities, and housing, yet current socioeconomic statistics reflect little structural change in the local economy, few improvements in the overall employment rate, disappointing educational achievements, and ever-deepening indicators of generalized social and economic distress in patterns equivalent to most other rural Navajo and Native American communities. A primary reason for this phenomenon lies in the basic structure of the funding relationship, i.e., the funds were provided to enable facilities to be constructed and services to be developed and rendered, but were not invested with long-term development goals in mind. The accumulation of capital, the development of financial institutions, and the support of primary economic development activities were not the focus of these dollars. Socio-economic symptoms appeared to be temporarily assuaged by these external resources, but underlying structures and processes -- reflecting the systemic dependency relationship -- remained relatively unaffected.
From the point of view of the local rural community (for instance, a Navajo chapter), compelling questions arise in the community's struggle to develop: How does the community relate to the institutions and entities surrounding it? As political subdivisions of the Navajo Nation, how do chapters relate to the County, the State of New Mexico, the Council of Governments, other public and private sector entities? Although resources and technical assistance are available in some measure from the Navajo central tribal government, chapters' needs are far from being satisfied -- local infrastructure is utterly inadequate; hundreds of families are on long waiting lists for housing, access to water and power lines, etc.; businesses face prohibitive bureaucratic and land status barriers which make business development on the Reservation all but impossible; and there are few jobs. Where can chapters turn for recourse, for obtaining the resources necessary to meet basic human needs and beyond that, for developing new capacities for growth and development? Many of these issues likewise concern the region's Pueblo Indian communities (Zuni, Acoma and Laguna).
Historical and current funding streams have obviously failed to meet significant portions of community development needs, and one can readily project decreases in even those conventional public resources (tribal mineral royalties, State funds, and Federal funds) from which the limited development dollars have been extracted to date. Of particular need is for communities to have financial resources available to them that are not encumbered by jurisdictional or bureaucratic barriers, nor by restrictions inherent in conventional lending policies. In light of current national and tribal trends toward devolution of governance and responsibility to more local units of government, it is timely to consider the establishment of development finance institutions, locally established and controlled to serve local community and economic development purposes.
Further complicating the development picture in the area's rural communities have been the problems associated with institutional relationships among the diverse agencies, bureaucracies, political systems, and jurisdictions established to govern the affairs and provide services to the communities. These relationships can be characterized as difficult at best and often fragmented, contentious, and dysfunctional in many respects. These attributes are most pronounced in the relationships between the Navajo Nation and a variety of institutions, owing in large part to the sovereign legal status of the Nation, its special trust relationship with the Federal government, and the internal and external legal and bureaucratic structures and processes that have evolved to cope with the issues, resources, and programs with which the Navajo Nation is involved. In attempting to meet local needs, the Navajo chapters face a veritable labyrinth through which to make their way to pools of resources from which to draw support for their projects, and few of the resources are either generated (as via a tax base) or controlled locally.
The Navajo Nation government is currently in lively debate on the issue of "local empowerment", i.e., the path to be followed to divest the central tribal government (and other agencies) of certain authorities, resources, and responsibilities and to devolve them to the 110 local Chapters. A key concept being promoted by the Executive Branch through President Albert Hale is that of building capacity at the local levels to support local planning, decision-making, and resource allocation for the benefit of local citizens. It is hoped that this will occasion a shift in the "organizing principle" around which governance is designed, i.e., from a centralized/paternalistic system patterned after the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (with a focus on the needs and requirements of a voracious central bureaucracy) toward a decentralized/self-governing system with a focus on the needs, aspirations, and investments of local people.
Although there is fairly broad consensus by the Navajo leadership across the three branches of tribal government with regard to the evident need for movement toward local self-governance, there remains a good deal of controversy over the specific means -- and the pace -- by which such a goal will be achieved. The view of the McKinley County Public Partnership, as expressed in its Coordinating Council meetings, is that the underlying intent of "local empowerment" lies at the heart of the Partnership and of local community development processes, and that strong steps in that direction must "come from within" in any case, and not rely on or wait for new legislation to "empower it".
Participation was greatly enhanced early on in the project by the work of Marshall Plummer, former Vice-President of the Navajo Nation, who served as a consultant to the project and helped communicate the goals and potentials of the project to Navajo leaders at all levels.
The Partnership worked to take advantage of telecommunications opportunities provided by the State of New Mexico through a special Native American program of the State Library, as well as by the Agency Networking Program being undertaken by the Legislative Branch of the Navajo Nation. These programs involved the provision to local Navajo Chapters of computers and access to the Internet, along with technical assistance. It became a goal of the project to get all of the Partners inter-linked electronically -- a goal still being pursued.
As a spinoff from the Partnership initiative, the COG and the Navajo Community Development Division collaborated in providing strategic planning assistance to two non-Partnership Navajo communities [Shiprock (the largest Navajo community serving as capital of the Shiprock Navajo Agency); and Crownpoint (capital of the Eastern Navajo Agency)], as well as a "local empowerment" strategic planning workshop for the Navajo Division of Human Resources.
Midway through the two-year Ford-funded Partnership project period, downsizing within the Navajo Nation government resulted in Reduction-in-Force actions affecting all of the Nation's planning and technical assistance personnel, thus slowing the collaborative planning process. Ultimately, the Partnership hired one of the Division's former key planning staff, and new momentum was achieved in pulling together local plans.
As of this writing, the Partnership is assisting local communities to assemble community data and plans into Community Portfolios, which will in turn be used to generate "joint plans" for the Partnership Zone as a whole.
a.Sovereignty: A key issue affecting virtually all relationships between Navajo communities and the non-Navajo world is that of tribal sovereignty, which emphasizes the independent political nature of the Navajo Nation. In this context, applications of the sovereignty principle can extend across a wide range of issues. One example affecting the project was the Navajo Nation government's decision not to participate in the associative structure of the Council of Governments. Stemming from this general position, for example, were directives from the Navajo President's office for local Chapter communities not to avail themselves of the COG's technical assistance in the development of Infrastructure Capital Improvement Plans for submission to the State of New Mexico. Additional implications of the sovereignty principle included discussions on the degree to which local Navajo Chapters could enter into partnerships, agreements or contracts with any external party, as well as the degree to which Navajo citizens could rely upon "dual citizenship" to access State resources in addition to the Federal resources directly allocated to the Navajo Nation.
Some of these issues are intensified by the Navajo Nation's current debates on "local empowerment" (or "local governance" as current legislation is labeled), in that the devolution of central tribal powers and authorities eventually touches upon the issue of the viability of legal and working relationships between local Chapters and non-tribal entities.
b. Local Empowerment: In general, the McKinley County Public Partnership benefited from the new public dialogue stimulated by the Navajo President's local empowerment initiative. The participating partners on the Coordinating Council were in agreement that "local empowerment" was, almost by definition, within their own hands and therefore not dependent on new legislation or permission from the central tribal government. On the other hand, the Navajo legislation -- once passed -- would undoubtedly provide for new resources to be invested at the local level, along with increased emphasis on the development of local governance skills and capacities. Thus, while the debate continues to grow on the specific pace and detail of Navajo local governance, the Partnership is running in parallel, providing local communities with inter-community opportunities and planning resources to gear up for the new authorities soon to be gained.
c. Partnerships: Once jurisdictional issues and conflicts are resolved, and when concerns about sovereignty are addressed or laid aside, partnerships between tribal entities and other parties have proven to be powerful tools for social and economic advancement. The most promising recent development in this regard is the Navajo Partnership for Housing, which evolved from cooperative work with the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, and which has already made great strides in solving bureaucratic barriers to housing development and in obtaining new resources for the planning and development of new housing projects. Through the regular meetings of the Coordinating Council, partners have come to see new ideas and opportunities made possible by joining together in common work. Particularly as local needs become better defined and development projects better prioritized, local leaders are increasingly aware of the gaps between needs and resources. The most effective pathway out of the stalemate involves joining up with other local communities and networking with public and private sector agencies to create new development opportunities.
For most of the project period, the Partnership has been predominantly informal in its structures and methods, with the emphasis being on inclusion, education, information-sharing and capacity-building. Its new challenge is to take the next step as an organization of local communities and their development partners through formalization of its structure, adoption of common objectives and projects, and implementation of a joint work program.
The Partnership is strong to the extent that COG and State staff were able to devote time to relationship-building, communicating, networking and assisting local communities to assess conditions, set goals and solve real problems. Conversely, the Partnership is weak to the extent that the human resources were insufficient to move those processes forward at an optimum pace. The intellectual work of analyzing, critiquing and re-designing systems has needed a counterbalancing thrust into the crux of the local planning work, bringing to bear State, COG, County and other technical resources. From such local processes, needs and priorities could then move upward into the broader picture of the Partnership's target zone, and local buy-in and participation in the overall Partnership would be accelerated. Good work has been done in this area, but less intensively and consistently than needed. The key, then, is dedicated project staffing.
In ways related to the above paragraph, we have discovered that there is no substitute for the investment of time and energy in building working relationships and in "working the process". The time and energy required in the evolution of relationships and the productivity of processes cannot be precisely predicted, measured or forced. At the same time, timing and effectiveness can be greatly enhanced by consistent effort, frequent communication, and "little victories" in which partners' needs for information, support and inspiration begin to be met along the way.
The Partnership's relationship-building process met with frustration at several points owing to fluctuating participation patterns, inadequate staffing to sustain regular field work, and local political changes resulting in shifting roles, new faces and new priorities. The key for the Partnership initiative has been to sustain networks that extend broadly and deeply into the local and regional political soil, thus ensuring some measure of continuity in the overall process.
Many of the initial discussions of the Partnership centered around the existing processes, bureaucratic structures and barriers facing local communities in their efforts to promote community and economic development. This led to speculation about the possibility of reforming and re-designing such systems to better meet the needs of the communities. In consultation with the Northland Institute, however, the partners were encouraged to "refresh their thinking" and look toward new alternatives in the light of successful experiences in rural communities internationally. The emphasis, then, came to rest on more proactive approaches to the identification of local assets, needs and priorities, to the location and assembling of resources, and to the local control of development processes and outcomes.
The Partnership initiative has revealed to the COG, the County and the State Local Government Division a much clearer picture of the "scope of the gap", i.e., the deep chasm between (a) the infrastructure and economic development needs of the rural communities and (b) the limited resources available to address them. Local leaders often commented on what amounts to a "Catch-22" situation in which local communities do not have the financial and human capital with which to mount and sustain a development campaign, while at the same time they are being encouraged to become more independent and to get their citizens off the welfare roles.
The example was given of a rural Navajo community (population 2,500) whose labor force statistics showed a chronic 65% to 75% unemployment rate, despite significant streams of federal dollars into that community for health care, education and other services. The community leadership wanted to reverse that statistic within 10 years, i.e., to put three out of four able-bodied people to work in that community. Further analysis revealed the harrowing fact that, in order to achieve that goal, every current job would have to be maintained across the 10 years plus the community would need to generate an average of 83.3 new jobs per year for each year of that timeframe -- this, in a community totally dependent on federal and tribal funding, whose net gains in jobs over the previous five years had averaged 3 jobs per year. The implications of this realization were staggering. Discussions soon moved beyond conventional employment and infrastructure strategies toward the consideration of new approaches to rural livelihood, cooperative economics and self-reliant systems; any real changes, however, await the political will to move in new directions, as well as the technical expertise to support and sustain local innovations.
The "gap" could also be discerned from analyzing the maps of the area. The rural communities were often depicted as "open spaces", as opposed to real human communities with population centers, community facilities, widely dispersed residences and hundreds of miles of dirt (or seasonally, mud) roads. In this context, it was difficult for governing bodies to get a feel for the significance of the rural issues, and it was difficult for the rural communities themselves to get a handle on their own situations. A key role of the Partnership was to assist in the community assessment process, to generate GIS maps with infrastructure, community facility and other overlays, and to help communities develop strategic plans for future development. The results of these activities are being compiled into "Community Portfolios", which will be regularly updated and ready for use for a variety of planning, funding and advocacy needs. In fact, the Community Portfolio has been the key means for helping bring some closure to the overall planning process.
In light of the many jurisdictional issues affecting the development of rural communities in McKinley County, the structure of the McKinley County Public Partnership has developed slowly and informally. The Navajo Chapter communities were well-defined as sub-units of the Navajo Nation, with political and administrative systems in place, so participation by elected and appointed leadership in those communities was more readily achieved than in the unincorporated settlements. Even so, each monthly meeting of the Coordinating Council tended to welcome several new people to the table, and there was a general consensus that the Council meetings should be open and inclusive. This approach seems to have been appropriate to the largely educational and informational nature of these meetings, and there was little pressure to formalize the group into more of a "governing" or directive body.
On the other hand, Coordinating Council activity has been largely staff-driven and thus has remained dependent on the COG administration for its direction. The structure has tended not to build ownership, commitment and leadership on the part of the rural partners, nor identity as a group, and Coordinating Council meetings rarely included representation from more than one-half of the rural communities. Three of the Chapters did produce official resolutions from their respective governing bodies (discussed and voted on "town meeting" style in monthly Chapter meetings) committing to participation in the Partnership. The unincorporated communities did not have similar mechanisms for formal involvement. In any case, the initiative could have benefited from greater attention to the structure, role and identity of the Coordinating Council.
The Partnership has worked hard to study community development models and to localize and enrich them through interaction with philosophies and models indigenous to the area. Visual representation of the elements and processes of the community development effort has been a powerful educational tool in Coordinating Council meetings and in presentations at statewide conferences. Representations of our "take" on a customized development model are illustrated in the attached graphic diagrams.
Figure B illustrates the regional Community Development Corporation's model, which emerged from the work of the Partnership and built upon the work of the Aspen Institute, as recommended by The Ford Foundation and The Northland Foundation at its Ford grantees training conference held at Lake Tahoe in June 1996. Key elements represented in this model include:
Figure B: MWNM CDC Development Model
Aspen's "development triangle" is represented as a stand-alone diagram in Figure C.
Figure D suggests a "Four Directions" planning model derived from the interaction of indigenous Navajo philosophy with "Western" systems. This model includes a spatial/directional orientation, derived from the unique powers and characteristics attributed to each of the four cardinal directions:
Figure C:
Figure D:
In working with this model, all partners are encouraged to include all of these elements. If one might imagine a "twirling diamond" juxtaposed on the "development triangle" diagram, the dynamic and holistic planning process is realized, in which the Four Directions process informs the work being done in each of the development arenas, i.e., stewardship, economic development and civic capacity. Use of this visual representation has been extremely helpful in stimulating engagement and discussion among the partners and at the local level.
As anticipated in the above discussions, the next steps in the evolution of the project's structure will include two aspects:
Northwest New Mexico is seen to be ideal for the establishment of such a development bank, owing to the evident social and economic needs of the area, the predominanace of minorities (mostly Navajo Indians) in the population, and the unique sociocultural and economic dynamics of the region. In support of the development bank (known local as the DevBank), a range of public and private investors will be invited to participate, including such entities as:
foundations (e.g., program-related investments [PRI])
In the absence of the needed expertise within the region to design and implement such a development bank, the Ford Foundation will assist the COG to access international expertise and to hire professional staff.
The term "projecteering" has been coined to refer to the process of assisting local communities with the solving of specific problems in the conceptualization, design, funding and implementation of projects. Often the technical, legal, bureaucratic and financial processes involved are so extensive that many needed and worthy projects never come to fruition. Yet others have been painstakingly developed, only to be delayed by one or two factors that remain unresolved. And perhaps most importantly in the long-run, many needs continue to go unmet due to the lack of creativity, innovation and access to alternative methods and technologies that have been used with success in other parts of the world. The new phase of the Partnership initiative will include this innovative problem-solving sort of technical assistance to partner communities
A major thrust of the new phase is the engagement of local rural leaders in a systematic rural leadership training process, including the design of curricula and training activities tailored to the assets, conditions and cultures of the local communities. This process has begun in collaboration with the community leadership program sponsored by the Gallup Campus of the University of New Mexico known as Leadership McKinley, and will be expanded to provide broader access to leadership training opportunities.