Governance or Poverty Reduction? Assessing Budget Support in Nicaragua

__Abstract__ General Budget Support (GBS) is assumed to lead to more effective poverty reduction through non-earmarking of the money and through recipient country ownership. A second and more hidden objective of GBS, however, is to influence policies and governance of recipient countries. This paper develops an evaluation framework that takes the tensions between these two objectives into account. It then assesses the results of GBS in Nicaragua under two administrations. It concludes that for most donors, the aim of improving governance was more important than poverty reduction, in both government periods, thus reducing the effect of GBS on poverty reduction. In addition, donor influence on governance was limited

Each to their own: Ethnographic notes on the economic organization of poor households in urban Nicaragua

This article presents some ethnographic notes on the economic organisation of poor households in urban Nicaragua. These highlight a number of atypical features that raise several important theoretical questions. In particular, they highlight the possible emergence of non-cooperative households, and point to a problematic association in the literature between doubly ‘naturalised’ notions of kinship and households. The article concludes that not only are neither households nor families inherently cooperative, but moreover they are not internally unified institutions. They are rather multifaceted in nature. In order to properly understand them they need to be conceived in terms of their internal institutional dynamics