Local Governance in Timor-Leste - Secretaria de Estado da Arte e ...

'civilising' mission: a way to bring a 'one-size-fits-all' democracy to the countryside"(2005: 524).Regardless of the intent of this policy, it ultimately proved to be CEP's downfall. Inaddition to the exclusion of legitimate leaders, the World Bank's requirement thatCEP members be literate meant that that mainly young literate people were electedonto the councils. However, these young people tended to not come from the familygroups that were ancestrally empowered to exercise local leadership, a clearindication that they were regarded more as project implementers rather than localleaders (Hohe 2004: 52). As such, the Village Development Councils could notcompete with the authority of the chefe de suco (Chopra and Hohe 2004, 296-7), aproblem that manifested in various ways. Sometimes the Village DevelopmentCouncil and chefe de suco worked quite well together, but community memberswould not attend council meetings unless the chefe de suco called them in (Ospinaand Hohe, 2001: 127). Other times, there was direct conflict between VillageDevelopment Councils and the chefe de suco, as the chefe de suco felt excluded andundermined by the council's power to disburse much-needed resources within thesuku (Ospina and Hohe, 2001: 128, Hohe, 2004: 50-51).While the CEP had succeeded in getting resources out to the villages, its primary aimof introducing democratic institutions at the local level was a failure. As Moxham(2005: 522) argues, an underlying flaw within CEP was the inherent tension betweenspeedy resource distribution and the creation of institutional structures designed toencourage local-level democratisation. By privileging the distribution of resources,often according to World Bank priority areas, the CEP allowed insufficient time andcare for the encouragement of genuine local participation. Local perceptions of theCEP as an infrastructural development program—as opposed to a democratisationprogram—were also confirmed in my interviews with xefe suku in 2008 who listedCEP projects as simply another 'NGO project', of interest because of the resourcesthat came into the suku rather than their impact on local-level governance.As UNTAET's administration was to draw to a close on 20 May 2002, theadministration shifted its attention to organising two major elections, the successfulconduct of which was to showcase the success of the mission. The first election was103