Chapter one: LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter brings to light the available precognition flows
on the research issue. It is subdivided into three main sections: the
conceptual framework, theories and hypotheses building on variables.
I. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
The conceptual framework as the first section is about to
define and explicit the research concepts setting this topic.
I.1. Local leadership
empowerment
What leadership is? How did it rise across eras? What should
be understood as local leadership empowerment?The present subsection comes to
answer these questions.
The concept of leadership
Brief history of leadership
Leadership is as old as societies have been made up. An
important wave of changes till the current consideration has been noticed over
eras. Therefore, during the antiquity, leadership was attributed to either
divine or mythic source. A huge establishment of kingdoms and empires has
followed and was set on the same ideology. For instance, the Roman Kingdom, the
Trojan kingdom, the Greece empire, Carthage, etc. At these times, leaders
passed to be authoritarian, insulated from others, liked overdone obedience,
and misused fear and abuse to pressure folks. As a result, people were
persuaded that only a few individuals were able to lead. In contrast, in the
course of Middle Age, power has been continuously transferred from kings to
parliaments. Thus, there intervenesa question of source of power. Rousseau
(1762) in his «Social Contract» insisted on the population as source
of authority. The lift-off of democracy made elected leaders to be accountable
vis-à-vis to people they represented. However, it has been noticed that
most of time they were not accountable and that they were misusing their
authority than people could want. In the contemporary times, yet democratic
process is applied to design the leader but people no longer understand that
being accountable depend on one leader's will. Reason why, all over the world,
some nations adopted democracy, while others are under despotism. Currently,
leadership has taken an institutional and organizational trend viewed as a
combination of inborn and achieved qualities.
What the concept is about
Many authors have attempted to define, with some differences,
the concept leadership. Some particularly selected are UNDP (2006), Smith
(2010), Ganta and Manukonda (2014) and Madanchian et al. (2017).
In fact, Smith (2010) considers leadership as the ability to
adapt the setting so everyone feels empowered to contribute creatively to solve
the problems.
Madanchian et al. (2017) likewise deems that «the
effective leader creates the situation that is best for the organization
through the use of skills and process.»
The most global consideration of leadership comes from UNDP
(2006) for which the vision of leadership is to focus on the relationship of
individuals to the group, concentrating on the development of the collective
rather than on a single role in the whole. So, leadership depends on both power
- the ability to influence people - and authority - the ability to
influence decisions-making and resource allocation. (UNDP, 2006).
The definition brings out that a leader should demonstrate
meaningful qualities helping him to perceive or expect a problem, to define
effective strategies to resolve it. Therefore, a collective action is needed
from collective hands without which a leader will struggle into inefficiency
and failure.
In the same boat, Ganta and Manikonda (2014) consider as
leadership, «a kind of power where one person has the ability to influence
or change the values, the beliefs, behavior and attitudes of another
person». Though their definitions are not altogether different, important
precisions are pinned on. In its core, it proposes a profound alteration in
one's inner. Another consignment is advanced by Huque (2014) for whom local
leadership in underdeveloped countries is related to traditional and cultural
aspects of power and authority, and their application on how leading
localities. In that event, four categories of local leadership were given by
Khan (1999) including elder or senior village headmen, dispute settlers,
village politicians, and people acknowledged as men of honor.
In this study, a «local leader» refers to a
traditionally-established and traditionally-tied (elected or designed)
authority whose purpose is to lead and defend folks' interests in general. They
are here considered to be established in countryside rather than in town, to
lead rural folks rather than urban and maintain their control in their entities
rather than nearby town. This definition is inspired from attributions and
duties of rural chieftaincy toward their folks around the chiefdom.
Local leadership empwowerment is
thus approached as an act by which an individual undertakes to strengthen local
leadership in order to archieve it objectives through one or more mechanisms,
such as monetary donation, assets, capacity building, etc. This study preaches
contributions of notables dwelling in bukavu to ermpower local leaders only
taking into account monetary donation. This is consecutive to the insignificant
amount allowed to these authorities in terms of retrocession to boost local
development in their entity. Though there is no legal obligation to do so,
moral and social obligations can be tied to that practive already lauched in
gain of the chiefdom.
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