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



Introduction

In the mid-1990s, an initiative was launched to provide special
debt relief from public creditors to more than forty Highly Indebted Poor
Countries (HIPCs). In 1999, this initiative was further refined and widened
in what has been hailed as a new approach to development co-operation.
The indebted country is to produce a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
(PRSP), which will make clear how it will pursue the twin goals of sustain-
able growth and combating poverty. This is meant to provide guarantees to
creditors that the budgetary resources freed by debt relief will be used tot
combat poverty1. Interestingly, the conditions attached by the donor com-
munity for granting debt relief emphasize full country ‘ownership’, by which
is meant that the PRSP process must be country-led and the result fully
backed by the government, in contrast to some of the structural adjustment
programs which where written by economists from the IMF and the World
Bank and signed without conviction by the recipient government. A related
feature is that the PRSP must be produced in an open and participatory2
manner. More specifically, civil society should be consulted and be involved
in preparing the PRSP. The international donor community has eagerly es-
poused the thesis that civil society organizations (CSOs) can play an impor-
tant role in democracy and development. There is now considerable funding
for projects to strengthen CSOs in developing countries (Howell & Pearce
2000: 75). The Poverty Reduction Strategy goes one step further by insisting
that organized civil society be acknowledged as a partner by government.
This makes it the most important effort to date, to apply participatory ap-
proaches at the macro level (Tikare et al. 2001:3).

From the point of view of the donor community, a lot is expected from
the participatory approach in the PRSP formulation. « It was hoped that a
participatory process would contribute to broader country ownership of the
strategies, facilitate implementation and strengthen governmental account-
ability » (Bank-Fund Staff 2002:11). In general, the assumptions are that
participation of civil society will enhance institutional performance and
foster government accountability by giving civil society a role in monitor-
ing policy implementation. Civil society thus is turned into a watchdog of
government, alongside the media and parliament. Secondly, participation
will increase ownership of the development strategy, not only by the gov-
ernment, but also by the population, by stimulating reasoned debate, shared
understanding, and a partial consensus on some of the fundamental strate-
gic choices (Tikare et al. 2001:5; Eurodad 2001; McGee 2001:8). Thirdly,
participation of CSOs will increase the effectiveness of poverty reducing
policies, partly as a consequence of increased ownership and accountability,
but also more directly by involving the poor in identifying the causes of their
predicament and some of the remedies (e.g. Isham et al. 1995; Schusterman
& Hardoy 1997). Fourthly, in the long run, the forgoing three factors will
interact in a virtuous circle, deepening and strengthening both democracy
and the development process (Howell & Pearce 2000:75; Putnam 1993).

1 Much useful information

is available from the PRSP
website of the World Bank: http:
//poverty.worldbank.org/prsp/


2 The concepts participation and
consultation are used arbitrarily
in World Bank documents. Both
concepts are nevertheless quite
different. Consultation is not
binding, hence government can
choose whether or not certain
contributions from civil society
are to be introduced in the final
document. Participation goes one
step further in that government
allows civil society to take part
in decision-making processes.
In the Bolivian case, the official
results of the process were in-
troduced in the final draft of the
PRSP. We will therefore use the
concept of participation through-
out the paper, although some of
the civil society organisations
(CSOs) we interviewed insisted
that, because of the limited scope
of the topics open for participa-
tion, the process could at best be
called a consultation.


IDPM-UA Discussion Paper 2002-05 • 3



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