Dear Editor,
Much is said in Guyana about development, modernisation, transformation and investment, but far less attention is paid to one of the practical conditions that determines whether these ambitions succeed or fail. That condition is the movement of information across institutions and the ability of agencies to work with one another in a serious, organised way.
We do not speak enough about inter-agency coordination, and that silence has consequences. In Guyana, siloes are often treated as normal. Agencies work within their own boundaries, guard their own information, and proceed according to their own mandates, sometimes out of pride, sometimes rivalry, sometimes caution, and very often because we have not yet built a culture that fully appreciates how much modern planning depends on cooperation. Yet any serious process of building, constructing, regulating, forecasting or investing requires inputs from multiple stakeholders. If a country is trying to understand itself properly, plan effectively and execute complex programmes, then coordination across agencies is no longer a courtesy or a nice administrative ideal. It becomes part of the basic operating requirement of a state that wishes to think before it acts and to act with the benefit of the expertise it already possesses.
This becomes obvious once one looks at the practical demands of planning. An energy planner trying to forecast future demand may need to understand housing construction, industrial activity, vehicle imports, population movements, income growth and infrastructure expansion. A transport planner may require information generated by customs authorities, local government bodies, utility providers and economic agencies. An urban improvement programme, whether it involves roads, walkways, drainage, landscaping or the beautification of public spaces, may benefit from the involvement not only of engineers and central government planners, but also of city authorities, environmental officers, forestry specialists, utility providers and others whose perspective can improve the final result. In each case, better planning depends on crossing institutional boundaries rather than remaining confined within them.
There is, however, a real tension at the centre of all this. If politics is partly the study of how scarce resources are controlled, then information itself must be recognised as a strategic resource. Information confers influence. It can expose weaknesses, reveal performance gaps, shape narratives and create political risk, institutional risk and personal risk. A request for data
is therefore not always received as a neutral technical request. It may be interpreted as a question of exposure, control, accountability or future consequence. This helps to explain why system upgrades and institutional improvements often have to proceed under constraint, even when everyone agrees in principle that better information should lead to better decisions.
That constraint matters because modern investment planning requires depth of insight. Multi-billion-dollar projects, long-term infrastructure commitments and national development programmes all benefit from strong analytical work, and in Guyana many analysts have had to become resourceful in conditions of partial visibility, piecing together fragments, reconciling signals and building useful models from incomplete information. That ingenuity is valuable and should be recognised. But it should also be supported by a stronger national habit of producing, validating and responsibly sharing the data held by the institutions closest to the facts. Good analysts can do much with limited information; a serious country should still want to equip them with better visibility into the system they are being asked to study.
This problem is not unique to Guyana. Around the world, organisations often operate with incomplete information and are forced to infer what they cannot directly observe. Strategic analysts and intelligence agencies have long worked in this way, combining fragmented signals, patterns and institutional knowledge to produce judgments under uncertainty. In a developing state, agencies may find themselves doing something similar, assembling what can be known from scattered data streams, partial records and indirect indicators. Useful inferences can certainly be drawn in this way, but there are limits to how far any country should rely on fragmented visibility when the stakes involve billions of dollars, essential services and the long-term direction of national development.
A country’s capacity to coordinate information is therefore part of its development capacity. The issue is not simply one of technology, digitisation or databases. It is also cultural and institutional. Do our agencies see information-sharing, when properly governed, as a contribution to national intelligence and better decision-making, or as a surrender of leverage? Do we want planning processes that depend on extraordinary individual effort, personal relationships and improvisation, or do we want systems that make good coordination normal? Do we believe Guyana can build institutions that think across boundaries, share responsibility for evidence, and continue pursuing objective national targets even as political cycles turn? And do enough of us, in public office, in the professions and in ordinary civic life, believe in a Guyana that can become more coherent, more sensible and more serious about using its own knowledge to guide its future?
Yours truly,
Emille Giddings
