Civil Society Participation in Rwanda’s Poverty Reduction Strategy

The participation conditionality linked to the PRSP creates a wide range of problems. It is too ambitious to be workable, too vague to be monitored. The pragmatic way out has been for the Breton Woods institutions to be uncommonly lenient in the verification of this conditionality. Governments can thus get away with a semblance of civil society consultation. Rwanda's a case in point. We try to show that there has been very little civil society participation, and that any other outcome would have been quite unlikely, possibly even undesirable. We argue that donors should dramatically tune down their ambitions, and set country-specific, limited but firm benchmarks that a government must respect in its relations with civil society. If this had been done from the initial stages of the Rwandan PRSP, some small but significant steps forward could have been taken that stand in stark contrast with the hollow 'participation' actually offered to civil society in some limited areas where it was not ready to rise to the challenge, while at the same time the donor community did little to protect civil society when the regime was clamping down on elementary civil liberties.

The Bumpy Road from Paris to Brussels: The European Commission Governance Incentive Tranche

The EC recently launched a new aid instrument for the ACP-community: the “governance incentive tranche”, a modality designed to incentivise ACP-governments to carry out governance reforms. In this paper we analyse whether this new initiative incorporates the principles spurred by the aid effectiveness debate and adopted by the Paris declaration (2005). Evidence suggests that in design and practice, the incentive tranche is surprisingly similar to some of the unsuccessful aid modalities of the past. The paper argues that in order to fully grasp the complexity of donor behaviour, the donor’s domestic issues and political arrangements have to be brought into the analysis. The incentive tranche illustrates how the complexity of the European construction makes formulation of a coherent policy exceptionally difficult.

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

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 sustainable 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 community 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 espoused the thesis that civil society organizations (CSOs) can play an important 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 approaches at the macro level (Tikare et al. 2001:3).

Participation in PRSP processes Conditions for Pro Poor Effectiveness

The mandatory participation of civil society in the PRSP is hardly ever questioned. It is on the contrary generally applauded by the experts inside and outside of the aid business. If only there could be more of it, things would even be better than they already are, but any start, however modest, is to be welcomed. But is participation, no matter at what stage, where and with whom, always so precious or relevant? In this paper a more cautionary approach is proposed. A four level readiness assessment framework is being offered to guide donors in deciding when, if at all, such participation must be encouraged.

Policy Dialogue under the New Aid Approach: Which Role for Medium-sized Donors? Theoretical Reflections and Views from the Field

The new aid approach (NAA) pays particular attention to the politico-institutional dimension of development. It is largely centred around a reform-driven governance agenda. Donors must facilitate and support reform, and this implies that they move away from micro-managed and donor-driven projects towards more aligned and harmonized modalities of aid like capacity building TA and budget support, which are allocated and spent according to recipient priorities. But the trust that donors have is seldom complete, and the quid pro quo of working with and through the recipient is a policy dialogue (PD) where donors can advise the government but also exert some pressure. In this paper we look critically at the policy dialogue between recipient government and donors in order to find out if and to what extent a medium-sized donor, can play a role and add value to the PD. To start with we enumerate seven principles that we think underlie the NAA, which we then contrast with what can be realistically expected from donors and recipient governments from a political economy perspective.

The Belgian NGO landscape and the challenges of the New Aid Approach: dealing with fragmentation and emerging complexities

Belgium's Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO)-sector embodies some of the country's most distinctive characteristics. Two of its main features are the affiliation of many organisations to one of the societal pillars and the divergence of the NGO-landscape on the different sides of the language border. A high degree of fragmentation is the result of these traits, which manifests itself internally in a scattering of small organisations and externally in a dispersion of NGOs' aid in the south. Past attempts of the bilateral aid agency to alleviate this ineffective situation have only been partially succesful. Currently however the aid effectiveness debate is increasingly putting pressure on official and private aid actors to rethink the current practices of the non-governmental channel. Conflicting tendencies influence this debate, and in this chapter we aim to identify the elements that push the advance for a more effective Belgian NGO-sector, and those that possess the potential to obstruct it.

Budget support and policy/political dialogue : Donor practices in handling (political) crises

Budget support entered the aid scene at the turn of the millennium and it is considered as the aid modality par excellence to foster ownership and more effective aid through institutional reform. In 2008-2009 a number of political events in aid receiving African countries however pointed at the difficult relation between budget support and (political) governance. The paper analyzes donor policies and practices surrounding policy/political dialogue and budget support and offers a number of policy recommendations on where and how to deal with “political” issues. Based on a desk study carried in March-May 2010 at the request of the Belgian Directorate-General for Development Cooperation, the paper presents a substantial analysis of Mozambique and Zambia where two recent political crises were successfully resolved by five donor countries. The authors argue that using budget support to drive both democratic and economic change is hazardous. Acknowledging the synergy between policy and political dialogue, the paper posits that technocratic and democratic issues should be separated because there are obvious trade-offs between them. Democratic governance issues should be dealt with in a separate high level forum, and in a pro-active rather than reactive way. In addition, donors need to ensure their interventions do not undermine recipient countries efforts to democratize. In effect, they should lower their ambitions: 1) with regard to what they can do: change cannot be bought, it can only be supported; 2) with regard to what recipient governments can do: even when there is commitment, change is most often gradual, not in big leaps. If anything, politics and political savvy should be brought in more, because every reform (however technocratic) is profoundly political.

Nicaraguan civil society caught in the pendulum's swing? Shifting roles from service delivery to lobbying and back

Until the end of the 1990s, Nicaragua was marked with social conflict and internal political struggles. From 2000 until 2006 Nicaragua experienced a relatively democratic period, in which the country drafted Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) with participation of the civil society. In this period, the openness of the political system and the participatory dimension of the PRSPs helped to strengthen civil society and increase policy influencing. As a result a shift took place away from service delivery and towards more lobbying and advocacy. The election of Ortega in 2006 (Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)) as president introduced the shrinking of this democratic space. From that moment onwards, donors encountered difficulties in dealing with the participation conditionality. At the same time, civil society organizations (CSOs) found it difficult to counterbalance the increasing undemocratic tendencies despite their efforts to organize mobilizations. This paper argues that the NAA, which pushes civil society into the watchdog role, is rather troublesome in contexts which are politically closing down. Imposing the single role of watchdog on civil society is ineffective. The NAA should not be treated as a rigid blueprint but, rather, as a guideline for policy implementation dependent on the actual situation in the country of concern.

What determines the suspension of budget support in Sub-Saharan Africa?

This working paper examines what determines the suspension of budget support in Sub-Saharan Afric

L’aide internationale et la quête élusive du developpement socio-economique au Sénégal

Le Sénégal est un des pays les plus démocratiques de l’Afrique, très pauvre, et fortement dépendant de l’aide extérieure. A priori, on pourrait s’attendre à ce qu’il soit un des premiers bénéficiaires de la nouvelle approche de l’aide initiée par les donateurs bilatéraux et multilatéraux au début de siècle. En réalité, ceci n’est pas le cas, et le présent article pose comme argument que la réticence des donateurs est justifiée. Les caractéristiques qui donnent à la démocratie sénégalaise sa stabilité expliquent en même temps sa grande inégalité et le manque de volonté politique du gouvernement à s’engager dans des stratégies qui profitent véritablement aux pauvres.