The politics of establishing pro-poor accountability: What can poverty reduction strategies achieve?

ABSTRACT

The Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) experiment, along with other innovations promoted by the international financial institutions over the past decade, has promised to secure pro-poor forms of accountability in relation to development policy-making. New consultative processes and new forms of conditionality each promise to re-order relationships between poor citizens and their governments, and between governments and donors respectively. Using evidence from Bolivia and Zambia, we identify three critical problems with these claims. First, there is a tendency to focus on promoting accountability mechanisms that are largely discretionary and lack significant disciplinary power, particularly those reliant on certain forms of civil society participation. Second, donors have failed to overcome the contradictions regarding the role of extra-national actors in securing accountability mechanisms within particular states. Third, there is a tendency within the PRS experiment to overlook the deeper forms of politics that might underpin effective accountability mechanisms in developing countries. Ensuring accountability is not simply a technocratic project, but rather is critical for a substantive politics of democratization which goes to the heart of the wider contract between states and citizens. The PRS experiment, as located within a broader project of ‘inclusive liberalism’, reveals little potential to address this challenge.

KEYWORDS:

• Poverty Reduction Strategies
• accountability
• participation
• politics
• Bolivia
• Zambia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper draws in part on primary fieldwork that was carried out by Valerie Mealla (Consultant) and Inyambo Mwanawina (IESR, University of Zambia) in Bolivia and Zambia respectively. We are grateful for their expert assistance. Thanks also to Fletcher Tembo for his support and insights.

Notes

1 Liberalism is defined here as ‘A political ideology and form of governance that has hybridized over time, but generally emphasizes the benefits of markets, the rule of universal law, the need for individual human and especially property rights. In its approach to poverty, it eschews major redistribution, and emphasizes moral discipline and (again) markets’ (Craig and Porter, 2006: 11).

2 For broadly positive reviews of the PRS process see Booth (2003), Driscoll with Evans (2005) and World Bank/IMF (2005), while for strong critiques see Djikstra (2005), Oxfam (2004) and Stewart and Wang (2003); for more tempered critiques see Booth (2005), Cheru (2006) and World Vision (2005). For critical debates on participation in general see Brett (2003), Cleaver (1999), Cooke and Kothari (2001), Hickey and Mohan (2004, 2005). On participation within PRS processes, see Brown (2004) and World Vision (2005).

3 We define civil society organizations as those agencies which inhabit the public space between the state and market. Non-governmental organizations include international as well as local agencies and are ‘neither synonymous nor entirely congruent with civil society’, despite the tendency for donors to conflate the two (Bebbington and Hickey, 2006: 420).

4 An alternative reading, suggested by one of our anonymous reviewers, is that donors have focused on poverty of late in an attempt to be more responsive to their domestic constituencies rather than as a means of ensuring that recipient governments increase their accountability to their citizens.

5 The research methodology combined desk-based research with two country case-studies based on primary and secondary data. Interviews were carried out with key informants in government ministries, provincial and district administration, local government, and donor agencies in each country, and also with traditional authorities in Zambia and both business and workers associations in Bolivia. In order to examine local perceptions of popular involvement in participatory and accountability mechanisms, a household survey was undertaken in Zambia using a purposive sampling method, involving 200 households in urban, peri-urban and rural districts. In Bolivia, 42 interviews were carried out in six municipalities, two located in the highlands, two in the valleys and two in the lowlands.

6 This research was carried out prior to the election victory of Eva Morales and the MAS in late 2005.

7 We borrow this phrase from James Copestake, who applies it to his work on social exclusion.

8 There is a notable parallel here with the Millennium Development Goals, whereby the only Goal unaccompanied by an established set of indicators and timeline for progress is Goal 8 concerning the commitment of largely northern agencies, governments and companies to a global partnership for poverty reduction.