Elsevier

World Development

Volume 31, Issue 1, January 2003, Pages 53-69
World Development

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers: A New Convergence

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(02)00147-XGet rights and content

Abstract

Poverty reduction strategy papers represent both a primary policy device of international development institutions, and an instance of a wider international convergence of public policy around global integration and social inclusion. Charting the emergence of these approaches, this paper argues that this convergence has a number of structural predilections which favor the technical and juridical over the political economic, and a disciplinary framework over a practical contest. Drawing extensively on decentralized governance and poverty reduction programs in Uganda, this paper shows how these predilections obscure power relations and restrict practical and political options, while exacting heavy establishment and compliance costs.

Introduction

Early August 2001, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced a comprehensive review of the poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSP) approach adopted in 1999 to “help poor countries and their development partners strengthen the impact of their common efforts on poverty reduction” (World Bank, 2001a). In general, PRSPs aim to describe a country’s “macro-economic, structural and social policies and programs over a three year or longer horizon, to promote broad based growth and reduce poverty, as well as associated external financing needs and major sources of financing” (World Bank, 2001a). PRSPs are a professedly comprehensive, “country driven” approach to poverty, combining powerful econometric and ethnographic method with a battery of participatory techniques, and a sharp neoliberal economism, ultimately linked to other budgetary and debt-related frameworks. In practice, PRSPs tend to reproduce three or four pronged approaches to poverty reduction: (a) “promoting opportunity,” or more particularly broad-based growth, more recently rendered as “pro-poor growth.” (b) “facilitating empowerment,” especially by promoting “good governance,” which has grown from anti-corruption and public accountability measures to embrace a range of policy settings from fiscal management to decentralized governance and (c) “enhancing security:” especially involving investments in human capital, typically the health and education sectors. The third element often includes a fourth, involving special purpose financing arrangements, sometimes called “social safety nets,” or “social protection measures” for those marginal to or adversely affected by adjustment processes.

Despite limited evidence of the formula’s success, PRSPs have quickly multiplied and traveled. By January 2002, 10 countries had completed their first full PRSP, and 42 had completed the first stage, called Interim PRSPs (IMF/World Bank, 2002, p. 9).1 In the review, widespread public participation has been invited on the following questions: have governments taken the lead on PRSPs; has civil society effectively participated; how has this affected the content of the PRSPs; have they improved donor and government coordination; has the Bank and IMF fully supported the process?

We consider the terms of the review simply too narrow and instrumentally focused to foster substantive policy debate. Rather, we want to locate our contribution to the review in a broader international political economic and policy context. PRSPs, we argue, are best seen as part of a “Third Way” re-morphing of neoliberal approaches, a new convergence in which governments and agencies of various stripes in both liberal OECD and developing countries are focusing on optimizing economic, juridical and social governance in order to create ideal conditions for international finance and investment (for OECD examples, see Ministry of Social Development, 2001; New Zealand Treasury, 2001). This primary orientation, combining global market integration with efficient disciplined governance and enhanced, activated human and social capital, is seen as the best hope for generating sustained growth, social and economic stability, and including the poor in emerging structures of opportunity (Callinicos, 2000). This ordering of priorities has a certain logic which is worth reiterating: global economic integration first, good governance second, poverty reduction following as a result, underpinned by limited safety nets and human capital development. In this prioritization, we argue that both poverty reduction and social inclusion policy and strategy represent a refinement of the liberal political project, specifically a mode of “inclusive” liberalism, in which the disciplined inclusion of the poor and their places is a central task.

PRSPs may thus be seen as a “third way for the Third world,” a wide-ranging integrative framework for global growth and poverty reduction, aiming to become a “development” version of what Beck (1998) describes as a “democracy without enemies.” Such borrowing of policy formulations between countries and regions is characteristic of the globalized Third Way, as it clearly was for neoliberalism before it. PRSP, like Third Way Social Inclusion, is in this matter slightly more eclectic, if no more immune to the problems of applying governmental instruments and settings over long distances. PRSP economic policy certainly draws strength from the broader liberal consensus for open markets, sound fiscal management and transparent, efficient government. Governmentally, like other Third Way approaches, PRSPs demonstrate considerable public management inventiveness (Rose, 1999b), and sharp evaluative and normative technique, especially around public expenditure management and review. The quest for “modern,” efficient and “joined up” governance is in Third Way regimes combined with targeting of the poor and disciplinary rubrics ensuring active participation in “structures of opportunity.” Here they are supported by enhanced information and statistical methods for identifying, mapping, measuring and reporting on poverty, as popularized by globally themed publications such as “Voices of the Poor” (cf. Narayan, Chambers, Shah, & Petesch, 2000; Ministry of Social Development, 2001). There is a universalized focus on specific localities of poverty, which are commonly addressed via decentralized approaches, or by direct, ring-fenced central to local resource transfer mechanisms (e.g., social funds (SFs), and area-based initiatives such as health action zones).

Ideologically, “inclusive” liberal approaches everywhere are held together by polysemous, apparently apolitical catchwords such as participation, partnership, and community. Partnership and participation here have powerful legitimating roles, as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society groups are routinely involved as proxy representatives for the marginal. But these approaches are nonetheless prone to accusations of being mere “spin and deceit,” embodying a basic duplicity in dealing, on the one hand, with “the poor”––who are to be “included”––and, on the other hand, with the political economy of poverty and inequality––which is not robustly addressed, except through commitments to growth and “inclusion” (Levitas, 1998). As others have noted, Third Way rhetoric certainly has a special facility for re-branding and re-spinning new progressive outfits for old liberal policy (Rose, 1999a, Rose, 1999b), building what Perry Anderson described as “the best ideological shell of neoliberalism today” (Anderson, 2000). Likewise, critics of PRSP have argued for “stripping adjustment policies of their poverty reduction clothing” (Hellinger, Hansen-Kuhn, & Fehling, 2001, p. 1). PRSPs’ silence in the face of rising concern about the pervasiveness of unequal market power, consolidating corporate power, restricted migration and access to rich economies, and local political realities (elite capture, underregulated monopolies, rising global and local inequalities) has fuelled critics’ fires. Promoting universal global integration, while remaining silent about power issues, PRSPs heighten critics’ fears that they serve as an instrument of hegemonic economic interests. From this follows the charge that its “inclusion” is primarily a form of leverage and risk management, specifically of the risks of exclusion and instability, and that this project is advanced not primarily in the interests of the poor. In general, “inclusive” liberalism can look much like classical liberalism in its “crumbs from the table” charity (aid, not trade access), its education and policing of the poor, its keeping of questions of existing property and power distributions off the political agenda––all while appearing to stand shoulder to shoulder with the poor.

Because of practical constraints, this paper cannot provide a comprehensive critical account of PRSP. Nevertheless, we want to address critically the three central dimensions of PRSP (economy, governance, poverty), and in particular provide a close, place-based critical account (here, from Uganda) of one dimension (local governance in the immediate context of Uganda’s poverty reduction program). While somewhat lopsided in its empirical address to local governance in Uganda, the critique we offer is generic, and applicable to all three core dimensions.

In Section 2, we discuss PRSP claims to have moved beyond one-size-fits-all blueprints, while claiming to be a comprehensive, generally applicable framework. There is, we think, a doublespeak here, which denotes a basic structural conundrum. This conundrum, we suggest, is most akin to the notion of a “liberal order,” where liberty and the rule of law exist symbiotically, and, especially at the edges of the order, contradictorily (Rose, 1999a). Freedom and wealth in this schema are obtainable only in the context of discipline, and this within a broader, universalist framework which would “include” everyone, from multinational capital, to the destitute. This order is overtly, formally and universally rational: the “strange” reification of Washington Consensus settings (Kanbur, 1999), and the striking sameness of PRSP documents addressing poverty in markedly different national contexts we argue confirms the dominance of the global formal and technical framework over locally specific productive and political realities. In general, then, we argue that PRSP’s “inclusive” liberal approach is tendentially juridical (law and rational framework based––(Hardt & Negri, 2001)). In being so, it understates and obscures not just the structures of global market power, local political economy and sectoral local economic opportunity, but it also asserts a narrow, politically naive approach to governance that, as the Uganda case illustrates, contorts and limits local and national political scope and options.

Rational framing in development is hardly new (Craig & Porter, 1997). None of this is to say that globalization is inherently a bad thing, or that the poor’s interests, or global financial stability will not be best served in the long run by integration, or the establishment of a global liberal order. Nor is it to side entirely with civil society advocates (Kanbur, 2001), insofar as they might argue that more democratic contest and participation will routinely mean better outcomes. As the Uganda case in Section 3 demonstrates, and recent US farm subsidy increases remind us, striking the best technical and political development and poverty policy balance under global/local conditions will remain a very real challenge. In this paper, we do hope to make the scope and inherent tendencies of this challenge clearer. This scope, for better or worse, is considerable. The emerging convergence in policies for poverty reduction we argue represents an attempt to generate a level of global to local integration, discipline and technical management of marginal economies, governance and populations unprecedented since colonial times. The scope, we argue, becomes especially apparent when PRSPs are seen alongside and linked with other devices of measurement and allocation (poverty assessments), and of budgetary and resource control, including medium term expenditure frameworks (or MTEFs), and mechanisms for channeling resources to specially targeted sites, most prominently SFs and poverty action funds (PAFs). The Ugandan experience is instructive because it has been held up as exemplar of good practice with PRSPs and MTEFs and with instruments such as PAFs. We consider the costs of these success stories for countries and local communities entering these frames, especially in terms of how poverty is linked with global surveillance, subordination and undermining of local governance dynamics, the removal from public scrutiny of key choices and decisions, and the diversion of energies from the pressing task of designing appropriate domestic poverty and growth strategies.

In Section 2 of the paper, then, we sketch critical dimensions of PRSP’s formal liberal economism, summing existing critiques. In Section 3, we address both how poverty is represented and addressed, and the specific (Ugandan) governance contexts in which this address happens. Ironically, in our focus on local governance dimensions of PRSP, we repeat the privileging of the juridical over the political economic, and especially over local economic, sectoral and market structures and power. A critical account of the latter in PRSP context, which we think crucial, remains a task for another paper.

Section snippets

Poverty reduction: the elaboration of a global framework

The renewed International Financial Institution (IFI) orientation to poverty reduction was marked in history both by the World Bank’s, 1990 World Development Report (World Bank, 2000a) and when, infamously, John Williamson outlined in his 1990 paper what was to become the “Washington Consensus” among core (Washington) IFIs, including the World Bank, the IMF, and significantly the US Treasury (Williamson, 1990). Whether or not the Washington Consensus existed before Williamson’s presentation, it

PRSP frameworks and good governance: International and Uganda experiences

PRSPs provide a unique framing of poverty apparently amenable to diverse, often conflicting interests. In their preparation, ministries of finance sit together with ministries of local government, education or social welfare, and bilateral donors and IFIs commune with representatives of local and international NGOs, engineering contractors and private entrepreneurs. But the PRSP aims to be far more than a forum for exchange about priorities; rather, in practice, PRSPs must be administered

Conclusions

Uganda has achieved an unprecedented joining-up of poverty eradication plans, corresponding budgets, negotiated agreements and the extraordinary focus of resources around a common sense of purpose in the PRSP framework. But the costs are unprecedented as well, not just in terms of the bevies of international and local consultants, civil servants, politicians, critics and advocates required to design and manage the detail of these financing instruments and superintend the multitude of

Acknowledgements

The usual disclaimers apply: the views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and should not be attributed to either the University of Auckland or the Asian Development Bank. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the regional Conference on National Poverty Reduction, organised by the World Bank, UNDP, IMF and ADB, Hanoi, Vietnam, December 4–6, 2001. We are grateful for comments received from Clay Wescott, Andy Batkin, participants at the Conference, and two anonymous

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