PSIA - Gauging poverty impacts

This issue examines the usefulness of two recently developed analytical tools: Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) and Poverty Impact Assessment (PIA). Both approaches provide a framework to analyse the distributional impact of policies, programmes and projects:

• PSIA involves in-depth analysis of complex policy reform processes and offers evidence-based policy choices
• PIA focuses on decisions concerning development projects and programmes
  

To explore PSIA's and PIA's potential contribution to more effective poverty reduction policies, individual articles in this volume:

• describe the PSIA and PIA concepts
• explore how the structure of societies and institutional mechanisms influence reform processes
• examine case studies on agricultural reforms which underscore the importance of stakeholder power and policy dialogue
• stress the importance of a process approach to PSIA
• explain how political actors, institutions and economic processes influence each other
• illustrate the use of a PSIA tool (power mapping) to predict stakeholder support, opposition and influence in the case of water reform in Yemen
• discuss the lessons learnt by the German aid agency GTZ in applying PSIA from a governance perspective
• report how three PSIAs in Malawi led to more pro-poor policy designs and to the institutionalisation of PSIA as a basis for policy making
• summarise a DFID review of staff experience with PSIA
• recap a critical NGO review of PSIA practices
• explore why Senegal’s first PIA proved an ideal basis for discussing key issues and assessing poverty impacts of a major industrialisation project
• describe how PIA was used to study the impacts of businesses servicing the unmet needs of poor people