affairs should be managed. Nevertheless, they like to present it as if the re-
cipient government has had a large say, indeed has invented the new strategy
all by itself. The concept of ownership serves the purpose of masking rather
than revealing who is really in charge of the PRSP agenda21. Surely, the real
ownership of PRSP, as of previous structural adjustment policies, rests with
the donor community, under the intellectual guidance of the World Bank.
That the government must internalize those externally imposed reforms is
beyond dispute. But to call such a process of national appropriation of exter-
nally devised solutions a case of ‘ownership” is just not very convincing.
21 The World Bank labeling
negotiations with recipient
countries “policy dialogues”,
and northern NGOS describ-
ing their funding relationship
with southern NGOs as being
based on “equal partnership’’ are
other instances of this rich but
misleading vocabulary.
A more interesting question in the case of Bolivia is whether partici-
pation as a policy instrument is owned by Bolivian society and government.
And the answer is definitely yes. Participation in Bolivia is not new, nor
is it something the donors recently imposed or forced upon Bolivia. Quite
the contrary. Well before the participation conditionality related to PRSP,
Bolivia was experimenting with broad participatory processes. The Law of
Popular Participation (1994) and the Decentralization Law (1995) represent
the most remarkable efforts to date to increase participation on Bolivian soil.
In 1997, the Banzer administration organized the Dialogue 1 in order to find
a broad consensus around the political agenda that would be implemented
during his term of office. And in 2000 as a result from the National Dia-
logue 2, the Law of the National Dialogue (“Ley del Dialogo Nacional”) is
established in order to manage, implement, monitor and evaluate the poverty
reduction strategy. In this sense, the participation process as it took place
within the framework of PRSP is to a considerable extent homegrown and
endogenous. However, each regime has been creative enough to organize the
participation in such a way that it would bring out the strong points of the
own executive, while keeping the margin of change under control. Banzer
invited mostly labor unions to his Dialogue 1, because they were his major
civil society allies. His predecessor, the former President Gonzalo Sanchez
de Lozado -- one of the architects of the Law of Popular Participation --
decided to turn the focus toward the decentralized structures. Thus, maybe
the participation processes are mainly owned by the executive in power at
the given moment in time when the process is to occur. In this sense, the
PRSP participation process was definitely owned by the Bolivian govern-
ment. It discussed an organizational format for the participation process with
the donors, and then stuck to it and implemented it in spite the protests and
criticisms that were voiced by certain civil society sectors. The participation
process was all along a government-led process that was inspired by the po-
litical structures in place, selected political officials rather than civil society
representatives, and followed a political logic of representation which is not
necessarily the logic by which civil society functions and organizes itself.
As such, most of the CSO representatives we interviewed did not feel they
had ownership over the participation process, although the installation of
the Mechanism of Social Control, as a concrete result of the process was
well received. They did however feel ownership regarding the participatory
and consultation processes they conducted alongside or in preparation to the
Dialogue.
24 • IDPM-UA Discussion Paper 2002-05