attitude is an important part of ‘seed-bed support’, particularly in regard to being
facilitative to project initiatives.
At best benefit-cost assessments help project investors make sound, if greedy,
investment decisions. At worst they fail adequately to inform a community about
the protection of resources, about how to prevent adverse waste disposal, or about
how to be more certain of future correctional costs (what will happen when there
is a downturn in the longer-term economic situation?). Benefit-cost assessment
provides cost and benefit information for investors, project donors and (some-
times) for project recipients; yet these assessments mostly fail to address the issue
of ‘regional yield’ over the longer haul. They are usually predicated on only one
value premiss, investor profitability, whereas a input–output array of the kind out-
lined earlier in box 4.4 makes an attempt to come to terms with wider economic
and social outcomes. While it is possible to recognize many informational virtues
with a benefit-cost prognosis, it is necessary to evaluate such indications more
with the head than with the heart; keeping in view the question of which kind of
benefits, and at what kinds of cost, and of course to whom such ‘benefits and costs’
accrue?Project implementation
Development planning, and also conservancy practice, can be characterized as
seeking answers to three basic questions: ‘What do we have?’, ‘What do we want?’
and ‘What do we do to get it?’ – this latter aspect being the nub of ‘project imple-
mentation’. The three questions also identify with the more elaborate 11-step
‘sequence’ (figure 2.5 Traditional planning sequence) particularly the step 10 item- implementation – pursued in stages via the guidance provided by monitoring,
evaluation and adjustment procedures.
Log Frame, from ‘logical framework analysis’ (not that it is at all analytical!) is
a 1990s elaboration from the former MBO (management by objectives), PERT (pro-
gramme evaluation and review techniques), GAM (goals achievement matrix),
and CPA (critical path analysis) procedures. The LogFrame protocol can monitor
and evaluate input to a wide range of project-donor schemes, particularly those
involving the unilateral transfer from richer to poorer nations of fiscal and sec-
toral aid via specific projects. They also have a role to play in the monitoring of
progress for conventional project enterprises, and joint-venture projects within
commercial-industrial development projects and conservancy practice.
Project implementation centres on an ‘If-Will’ premiss: thus ‘if’ a project gets a
go-ahead ‘will’ the project goals be sufficiently attained? LogFrame may con-
tribute, via looping, to the ‘planning sequence’ (figure 2.5) but is largely confined
to project monitoring during the operational life of an enterprise, and to project
evaluation after the enterprise has reached its as-built stage. The box 4.7 construct
Log Frame project implementationoutlines the verification procedures involved.
The procedure is applicable to any other sectoral or service activity (for example,
education or health delivery) although in those cases care needs to be taken with
the specification and monitoring of the throughput components.
148 Practice