Rethinking Participation: Questions for Civil Society
about the Limits of Participation in PRSPs
April, 2004
Organization: Action Aid USA / Action Aid Uganda
Authors: Rick Rowden and Jane Ocaya Irama
Available: http://www.actionaidusa.org/images/rethinking_participation_april04.pdf
“Listening to the voices of the poor”, “community participation” and
bold claims to be committed to “poverty reduction” in the world’s poorest
countries have been among the leading high-profile mantras coming out of
the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in recent years.
It has been part of the “happy face” the global financial institutions
hoped they could paint over themselves as many civil society organizations
had roundly rejected their economic policy reforms attached as conditions
on development loans. The new Discussion Paper by ActionAid USA/ActionAid
Uganda, “Rethinking Participation: Questions for Civil Society about the
Limits of Participation in PRSPs,” is designed to elicit debate and discussion
among ActionAid country programs and other civil society organizations
(CSOs) which participate in public consultations for their national Poverty
Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs).
In 1999, the IMF and World Bank responded to 15 years of mounting international
protests against their loan conditions to poor countries by issuing a very
public promise to finally sit down with citizens’ groups in the world’s
poorest countries and together draft new development policies and loan
programs. The initiative was called the Poverty-Reduction Strategy
Paper process, or PRSP for short. The global financial
institutions said they would only give new loans and some foreign debt
cancellation to poor countries who would draft the national poverty-reduction
strategy papers. The papers are supposed to be based on a series
of government-led “town hall meetings” with citizens’ groups and nonprofit
agencies, women’s groups and development organizations held throughout
the country over a two-year period.
The new Discussion Paper by ActionAid shows, however, that citizens’
groups who have attempted to participate in these consultations over the
last four years have actually not been given any real authority or power
to change economic policies. The public consultations have
done little to change the basic set of economic policy reforms that the
IMF and World Bank push on poor countries as mandatory loan conditions.
In fact, the global financial institutions are still pushing many of the
same controversial policies as they have been for the last 20 years.
The high-profile effort to use “participation” rhetoric to get citizens’
groups to stop protesting in the streets and sit down at the table has
now run aground because, after four years of attempted participation in
the processes, no major policy changes have resulted in the key World Bank
and IMF loan conditions.
Citizens groups around the developing world have been voicing demands
for the World Bank and IMF to stop forcing the policy reforms on their
countries through the loan conditions. The loan conditions are based
on a set of free trade and free market-oriented reforms including privatization,
deregulation, financial liberalization and removing trade protection for
domestic companies. For many years human rights, women’s rights,
environmental organizations, health & education advocates and labor
unions have complained about the socially and environmentally destructive
results from these policy reforms. Economists complained that the
policies have failed to help poor countries achieve high rates of economic
growth or substantially reduce their high levels of poverty, particularly
when compared to the previous 20-year period (1960-1980).
The United Nations Development Program has criticized the World Bank and
IMF policies for relying too much on foreign trade and the private sector
to drive economic growth.
“But when they introduced the PRSP process in 1999,” said Jane Ocaya
Irama, Policy Coordinator of ActionAid Uganda and co-author of the new
report, “We thought we had finally been given a real opportunity to discuss
these controversial policies in public and to advocate for alternative
policies, but that has not been the case.” Instead, borrowing governments
of poor countries are well aware of the fact that their national PRSPs
must be approved by the executive boards of both the IMF and World Bank
before they can access more development loans or get any of the limited
debt-relief for their countries. Therefore, the borrowing governments
have a stake in carefully regulating what is allowed to be discussed in
the consultations for drafting the PRSPs.
“There is a lot of evidence to suggest that borrowing governments are
self-censoring themselves and what they permit to be discussed in these
consultations,” said Rick Rowden, Policy Analyst with ActionAid USA and
the other co-author of the new paper. He added, “They don’t want
citizens’ groups coming up with all kinds of alternative economic policies
that they know the World Bank and IMF will never accept, and they don’t
want any alternative policies to make their way into the national PRSP
strategy paper or else the paper might get rejected by the World Bank and
IMF and jeopardize their access to more loans. So in a lot of ways,
citizens’ groups are back to square one. The true participatory process
they were promised by the World Bank in 1999 has not materialized.”
The ActionAid Discussion Paper offers suggestions about how the PRSP
consultations might be improved, and it also suggests that citizens’ groups
consider forming their own public meetings where they would be more free
to discuss whatever economic policies they choose. “Getting people together
to talk about the current loan conditions and economic policy reforms favored
by the World Bank is the first step,” said Atila Roque, Executive Director
of ActionAid USA and a veteran of the World Social Forum meetings in Porto
Alegre, Brazil. “Only then can citizens’ groups put forward ideas
for better policies and then mobilize the public support for their governments
to adopt such policy changes.”
Jane Ocaya Irama added, “If the policy prescriptions of the World Bank
and IMF loan conditions are to ever change, then it will require that governments
in poor countries who take the loans need to hear from their own peoples
about support for alternative policies, and if the PRSP consultations are
not allowing for this kind of thing, then groups may need to act elsewhere,
in other kinds of public forums that they could control.”
Paper Summary
Part 1 of this Discussion Paper reviews the donor-driven nature
of the PRSP process and explores the dynamic in which international creditors
and donors essentially narrow the national policy making space available
in borrowing countries. Part 2 of this paper documents the four-year track
record of how CSOs have been precluded from publicly debating the current
structural adjustment policies in the public consultations for PRSPs. Despite
the official rhetoric that claims IMF loans (PRGF arrangement) will be
based on the poverty-reduction goals of a country’s PRSP, evidence suggests
that the reality is the other way around--that PRSPs must, in fact, be
aligned within the PRGF budget constraints set by the IMF. That many borrowing
governments must conform to PRGF lending conditions or else risk losing
access to all other international bilateral and multilateral creditors
and lenders must be acknowledged. It is important for CSOs to consider
the degree to which this external pressure limits the policy space available,
and circumscribes the outcomes of PRSP consultations. How should CSOs respond
to these limitations?
The main purpose of this Discussion Paper is Part 3, which raises critical
discussion questions for consideration by national and international CSOs
that continue to participate in the PRSP process. If the structural adjustment
policies and possible alternatives can not be discussed or debated in government-led
PRSP consultations, then CSOs should consider whether participation in
other CSO-led public formats might be a more useful strategy for advocating
alternative development policies and mobilizing domestic political support
for them. Arguably, the particular features of such alternative civic forums
and the degree to which they supplement the PRSP process or in?uence new
government decisions would vary from country to country.
The Annex offers a detailed list of “forbidden debates” on key national
economic policies that have so far been restricted from the agendas of
government-led PRSP consultations. These are key development policy questions
which CSOs may ?nd useful for public discussions and debates.