Strengthening civil society from the outside? Donor driven consultation and participation processes in Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRSP): the Bolivian case



ways to tackle political problems. If donors think that political governance
issues are so crucial to development in general and the effective use of aid
resources in particular that some conditionality is justified, they should face
the issue squarely and address the problem of corruption and badly function-
ing democratic institutions.

2.3. Forging a change but taking the sting out

Although the Bolivian participatory process falls nothing short
of an impressive exercise - an exercise most Western countries have never
undertaken - the results are heavily marked by the fact that it was externally
imposed on a government that at the same time had all the leeway to organ-
ize it the way it saw fit. We argue that the government succeeded in taking
the sting out in two ways: by de-politicizing the topics open for discussion,
and by politicizing the selection of the participants.

From the outset, the structure of the Dialogue and the questionnaire
upon which the social agenda discussions were based, heavily constrained
the scope for institutional change. The four topics dealt with in the question-
naire and in the Dialogue were often put in the form of yes/no questions and
the responses the municipalities would give were quite predictable: of course
the municipalities thought the local level the best place to combat poverty, of
course the municipalities choose to receive the HIPC II resources directly,
of course they did agree that the use of the resources should be monitored,
and obviously the Dialogue should be repeated every once in a while. It thus
seems that the results coming from the social agenda were largely predict-
able to the government that had been pulling the strings.

Furthermore, the structure of the Dialogue has been criticized be-
cause the organizational weight of the participatory process was mainly at
the
local level and on the social agenda. According to quite some CSOs
representatives this deliberately limited the potential role of CSOs to make
substantive contributions to the PRSP in the short run, and to a politico-
structural change in the long run.

Limiting significant participation to a social agenda - how are we
going to combat poverty with extra money coming in? - reduces poverty to
a social issue disconnecting it from the economic and political structures
with which it is inherently related. The social emphasis implies that poverty
reduction is largely based on a social welfare/basic needs model (GTZ 2002:
3-4). The existence of three separate tables, in spite the obvious links and
overlaps between issues, was therefore criticized by most CSOs, because
poverty should be analyzed and tackled in all its dimensions, including the
structural aspects related to the economic and political system. As such,
land tenancy and the legal problems related to property and access to land
were not discussed, although most of the social conflicts in Bolivia are con-
nected to these topics (interview Leyton). In that same sense, little or no

16 • IDPM-UA Discussion Paper 2002-05



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