Missing links in the politics of development: learning from the PRSP experiment

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers are five years old. It is six years since the Enhanced Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC2) placed on the international agenda a new type of donor conditionality, requiring governments to prepare, and hold public consultations about, comprehensive three-year plans for improving their performance in reducing poverty. And it is five years since the first wave of PRSP processes was completed. This paper therefore asks: what have we learned from this experiment?

This paper tries to address three questions:

• What has been learned about the feasibility of "engineering" commitment to poverty reduction? And what does this imply?
• Could development cooperation do better within the PRSP framework, and if so how?
• What else might be worth a try? In particular, what might be done by Northern governments, outside the PRSP framework, to improve the results from aid-supported PRSPs?

The paper concludes that it cannot yet be said that the PRSP experiment has failed, if only because no better idea has yet been articulated by anyone. On the other hand, it is clear that PRSPs have not delivered what was hoped for, and the reasons include the rather simple theory of political change that was one of the conceptual underpinnings of the experiment.

This paper also draws attention to three types of possible international action that are missing links in the politics of development after five years of PRSPs, including:

• more serious understanding of country contexts by donor staffs
• a willingness to go public about issues that donors currently discuss behind closed doors
• a more serious effort to construct regional "neighbourhoods" and a global climate of opinion that would do what PRSPs have been unable to do – really incentivise the construction of developmental states in poor countries.