tions by donors is a nice idea, maybe political institutions should be granted
more, and more direct attention.
Bolivia is undoubtedly a good country to experiment with civil
society participation. There are a lot of civil society organizations, and the
political system in place is open to voice. Bolivia also suffers from serious
weaknesses in governance, as indicated by high scores on corruption and
clientelism, which may well have contributed to Bolivia’s enigmatically poor
economic performance since 1985. And to be sure, there have been consid-
erable successes in fostering participation and in producing institutional
outputs. Regarding the participation, there has been a National Dialogue
that was competently led by a Technical Secretariat. Participants in the
process managed to influence the PRSP. Parts of civil society have been
strengthened. Regarding institutional outputs, the PRSP produced the Law
of National Dialogue and a National Mechanism for Social Control. HIPC
resources will be allocated to the municipalities and are exclusively destined
to combat poverty. At the political level there was the decision to break the
monopoly of political parties to field candidates for election. Without PRSP
and donor pressure a lot of these outcomes would not have occurred. Never-
theless, the results are much less impressive than the official donor discourse
would let us believe.
The basic aim of listening to the poor was only very partially
achieved. The government mainly listened to local people, office holders
through the political institutions of the Law of Popular Participation.
Observers seem to agree that it is very doubtful that the poor were well
represented in this way. Certain civil society organizations were involved
and played a role, but they only represented a part of larger civil society, and
this has alienated some other parts of civil society, like the so-called social
movements and the indigenous communities. Put more generally, there
has been inadequate participation by all the relevant stakeholders. Large
absentees were the poor, civil society organizations out of favor with the
government, trade unions, women’s groups, but also extremely important
institutions for democracy, like parliament. At the same time, the impact of
participation remained limited to social issues. The Bolivian government
successfully avoided being drawn into discussions about structural reforms,
macro-economic policies and serious political reforms. The problem of
limited participation and limited agendas in the PRSP is not confined to the
Bolivian case alone. Such problems are recurring in most countries where
the participation processes are taking place. The World Bank and IMF how-
ever accepted these countries had satisfied the PRSP conditionality, in spite
of the shortcomings of the participation process. This is partly due to the
donors hesitating to be too much involved in internal politics, but also due
to the fact that they have not set out clear criteria to evaluate and distinguish
good participatory processes from poor participatory processes.
Outside the PRSP, the Bolivian government was allowed to treat civil
society much less considerately. The water and coca conflicts illustrate the
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