Introduction The Legacy of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Processes in Latin America: Introduction and Overview

European Journal of Development Research (2011) 23, 181190. doi:10.1057/ejdr.2011.1

Introduction
Since the turn of the twentieth century, the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) process has been at the center of international discussions of development and foreign aid. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) introduced the PRS process in 1999 as a tool for restructuring development assistance and donor-government relations. Countries were required to show their commitment to reducing poverty and achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by producing nationally-owned poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) through broad participation processes. These national PRSPs aimed to be long-term, comprehensive plans for reducing poverty in the country. The strategies were to be results-oriented; it would be possible to monitor the outcomes of the strategies over time and make adjustments if needed. In parallel, international cooperation agencies committed to align their aid with the priorities identified in the national PRSPs and to move towards forms of aid that would give governments more leadership over the aid process. This implied reducing aid provided through projects and increasing forms of program aid, such as budget support. In Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs), producing a PRSP was a condition for receiving debt relief from the Enhanced HIPC Initiative (HIPC II) of 1999. The overarching goal of all of these elements of the PRS approach was to direct national and international attention to the problem of persistent poverty and to make national governments and development partners collectively more effective in achieving poverty reduction. Ten years later, many countries continue to produce and revise PRSPs. The PRSP has become a condition for low income countries to access the soft loans of the IMF and the World Bank and to receive budget support from bilateral donors. Moreover, the principles and instruments of the PRS approach are reflected in the international agreements achieved in High Level Fora on aid effectiveness, such as the Paris Declaration (2005) and the Accra Agenda for Action (2008). Given the continued importance of PRSPs and of PRS process principles, it is important to draw lessons from this experience. The articles in this volume do just that, by examining the PRS experience in Bolivia, Guyana, Honduras and Nicaragua the four HIPC countries of Central and South America. Together, the articles make up a unique and valuable collection for a number of reasons. First, each of the articles examines a different aspect of the PRS process or evaluates the PRS process from a different angle donor behavior, aid relations, civil society participation, social spending, poverty reduction policy, economic growth, gender equity, forestry and rural development. The result is a rich and varied look at the PRS experience. Second, all but two of the articles examine the PRS process in comparative perspective, an approach which helps distinguish regional patterns from country-specific outcomes.
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Komives and Dijkstra The Latin American region is a particularly interesting one to study as it is in some important respects quite different from sub-Saharan Africa, where most of the PRS countries are found. Bolivia, Guyana, Honduras and Nicaragua are more developed than the many sub-Saharan African countries engaged in the PRS process. These four countries had medium levels of human development before the start of the PRS process and still do today: in 2010, Bolivia, Guyana, Honduras and Nicaragua ranked 95, 104, 106 and 115 respectively in the Human Development Index. The four countries also have active democracies and civil society groups. During the last 10 years, they all experienced multiple elections and, with the exception of Guyana, changes of government. These characteristics have the potential to affect the dynamics of the PRS approach. Although the countries examined in this collection of articles have important similarities, there are also important differences that make the comparison across the four countries quite interesting differences in land area, ethnic profile, economic base, donor mix and level of dependence on foreign aid. Bolivia is much larger than the other countries and has a large indigenous community. Honduras and Guyana have a lower presence of the like-minded donors than do Nicaragua and Bolivia. Guyana has a different colonial heritage than the other countries. Official development assistance is higher in Guyana and Nicaragua (19 and 28 per cent of GDP respectively in 2004) than in Bolivia and Honduras (9 and 7 per cent) (World Bank, 2010). A third unique aspect of this collection is the focus on the medium-term legacy of the PRS process. Most of what has been written about the PRS process to date is heavily weighted towards evaluations of the poverty reduction strategies themselves and of the initial participatory processes surrounding their creation. With some important exceptions, the majority of authors also base their conclusions about the PRS process on PRSrelated developments during a relatively short time period in the life of the PRS process in a particular country. The articles in this collection take a longer-term view of the PRS approach: most articles examine the period between 2000 and 2007. The goal is to assess how the principles and instruments of the PRS process fared over this time period and whether the process had a lasting effect on the aid process, the domestic policy and planning process, or on policy and poverty outcomes. The contributing authors answer questions such as: what institutions, practices, structures or policies did the PRS process change?; are these changes likely to ultimately make governments and donors more effective at combating poverty?; and what lessons can be drawn for aid relations, for governance and for poverty reduction strategies?

Conclusions Drawn by Other Observers of the PRS Process

Before describing the articles in this collection, we briefly summarize existing literature on the PRS process in general. Most studies of first generation PRSPs (those elaborated in order to qualify for the HIPC initiative) conclude that national ownership of the strategies was fairly limited. Ownership was largely limited to the group of technocrats writing the strategy plus the political leaders who were most interested in accessing the debt relief; line ministries were less committed (Booth, 2005; Driscoll and Evans, 2005; Whitfield, 2005; Holtom, 2007; Woll, 2008). Parliaments were not involved at all. The fact that the strategy had to be approved by the World Bank and IMF limited the possibilities for real participation and thus also for real ownership among the wider society (IEO, 2004; OED, 2004).
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Legacy of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Process in Latin America The contents of the original PRSPs reflected the then dominant international poverty agenda: market-based growth, continuation of liberalizations and privatizations, attention for good governance, and a focus on social sectors and social protection mechanisms (Craig and Porter, 2003; Stewart and Wang, 2003). This could but does not necessarily indicate that PRSPs were superimposed on domestic policy agendas: the similarity across PRSPs may also reflect the internalization of this poverty agenda by a group of key actors in government and society who stood to win by cooperation with donors; some countries have become post-conditionality regimes (Harrison, 2001) or have a fraternity of economists who direct the domestic policy agenda (Holtom, 2007). Less has been written so far about domestic ownership of second and third generation strategies. Woll (2008) observes that there was much less interference of donors for Ghanas second PRSP. Donors were not so much interested in the contents but more in the show (the PRS process) continuing. On the other hand, Canagarajah and van Diesen (2006) conclude that there was less high-level political ownership of the PRS in Uganda because the budget for the third strategy was significantly lower than for previous strategies. With respect to participation, many authors maintain that participation processes led to a larger group of actors becoming involved in public policies (Driscoll and Evans, 2005; Cheru, 2006; Holtom, 2007). Yet most concur that participation was in practice, at best, consultation (Stewart and Wang, 2003; IEO, 2004; OED, 2004; Gould, 2005; Lazarus, 2008). The World Bank IMF review of the PRS process (2005) characterized PRS participation as broad rather than deep and primarily focused on PRS formulation. To the extent that civil society groups were invited to discussions at the national or regional level, the agenda was usually determined by the government. This implied that macro-economic policies or structural reforms were not discussed. Useful participation was also limited because invitations and relevant documents did not arrive in time, or civil society constrained itself as it also had an interest in quickly receiving debt relief (IOB, 2003). Lack of commitment by government officials to the goal of poverty reduction was another barrier to meaningful participation in some cases (Molenaers and Renard, 2006). A general critique was also that representative local political institutions, such as Parliaments, were forgotten in participation processes, or were simply not interested in participating (Booth et al, 2006). When consultations were extensive, it was both practically and politically difficult to integrate widely diverging detailed demands into a national strategy. More fundamentally, Molenaers and Renard (2006) question whether is it possible to solve deeply embedded problems through consensual participation. Beyond influencing poverty reduction strategies themselves, PRS participation was supposed to help increase incentives for government officials to prioritize poverty reduction. Studying the case of Latin America, Booth et al (2006) conclude that the PRS process failed in this respect PRS participation did not change political incentives or increase political support for prioritizing poverty reduction. Other critical reviews of participation processes for the PRSP argue that the donors attempt to open political space for non-state actors was deliberately meant to increase the power of external actors, ` -vis both official donors and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), vis-a the government (Fraser, 2005; Lazarus, 2008). A number of studies suggest that the outcomes of the PRS strategies have been limited in part by a lack of effective implementation. Authors cite weak links between PRSPs and government budgets (Cheru, 2006) or the fact that, despite donors push for improved budgeting, national budgets were not reliable instruments for guiding and
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Komives and Dijkstra determining policy implementation (Rakner et al, 2004; Lawson et al, 2007). Pro-poor expenditure and social sector expenditure have increased in most or all HIPC countries (IDD and Associates, 2006; IEG, 2006). However, this did not necessarily lead to higher efficiency and quality of public service delivery (Lawson et al, 2005; IDD and Associates, 2006). In terms of the changes in aid relations that the PRS process was expected to generate, many authors concur that progress in donor harmonization and in donor alignment with national policies and systems has been slow (Driscoll and Evans, 2005; Booth et al, 2006; Cheru, 2006). More critical analyses find that the PRS process did not represent any real departure from the aid relations and policies under structural adjustment (Cling et al, 2003) and could even undermine democratic forces and structures (Gould, 2005).

Overview of Articles
In the opening article in this collection, Geske Dijkstra and Kristin Komives address aid relations. They focus on the principles of the new aid paradigm, which underlie not only the PRS approach but also the Paris Declaration and the Accra Agenda for Action. At the heart of the new aid paradigm is the idea that countries will have a medium- to long-term poverty reduction strategy or comprehensive national development strategy. Dijkstra and Komives show that, in practice, these strategies did not demonstrate government commitment to poverty reduction and were short-lived. As a result, they are not an effective basis on which to restructure aid relations and move toward program aid. The article also demonstrates that program aid is not in practice necessarily harmonized, aligned with national systems, or predictable. An important message for donors is that changing aid modalities is not enough to achieve the core principles of the new aid paradigm. In the next article in this collection, Rob Vos examines macro-economic challenges associated with financing a poverty reduction strategy over the long term. The PRSPs in Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua were built on the assumption that it would be possible to simultaneously achieve higher rates of economic growth, progress towards the MDGs and reductions in income poverty. In reality, Vos argues, there are important time lags in the effects of social and productive investments, which give rise to macroeconomic trade-offs and financing constraints. Vos uses an economy-wide model that links economic growth, social spending and poverty reduction to illustrate this problem. Simulation results suggest that, even without the economic crisis of 20082009, Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua would not have been able to achieve the MDGs within reasonable financing constraints. To counteract the effects of the crisis and simultaneously maintain progress towards the MDGs, government spending requirements would need to increase, threatening to drive the countries back to pre-HIPC debt levels, unless donors jump in to fund the spending increase through non-debt-creating development assistance. Niek De Jong and Arjun Bedi provide another view on spending and social welfare outcomes in their article on the effects of debt relief in Guyana. The authors find that social spending in Guyana increased over the 1997 to 2006 period, with the largest increase coming in the late 1990s under the original HIPC debt relief program, before the creation of Guyanas PRSP. It is hard to ascertain whether increased social spending has produced
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Legacy of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Process in Latin America tangible improvements for the poor as Guyana does not regularly track pro-poor social spending, and there were no income poverty measures available for the post-PRS period. Nonetheless, case studies of spending in a number of Guyanas anti-poverty spending programs suggest that institutional inefficiencies hamper the translation of higher social expenditure into improved social outcomes. The issue of institutional efficiency and capacity also emerges as a theme in Cristobal Kays piece on rural development and the PRSPs in Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua. All three countries had rural development plans, which appeared later and separate from the PRSPs. Neither the PRSPs nor the rural development plans did much to address the structural causes of rural poverty, such as the unequal distribution of assets and wealth. Kay suggests that much more ambitious reforms along the lines of those undertaken in South Korea and Taiwan would be needed to produce a significant improvement in rural poverty levels. This would require a level of state capacity and political commitment to the problem that did not exist in the three countries studied. Kay concludes that rural poverty was not a political priority during the PRS period. The next article, by Lorenzo Pellegrini, looks at one aspect of rural development policy forestry. His story about forestry in Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua reveals how little difference the PRS process can make. The PRSPs and national development plans in all three countries recognize the potentially important role forestry could play in reducing poverty. Nonetheless, the PRS process did not improve the implementation of existing forestry regulations or replace regulations that Pellegrini finds are flawed or unviable. Social- and pro-poor forestry initiatives in the three countries remain very small scale and depend almost entirely on donor and NGO support. Pellegrini argues that unleashing the sectors potential to benefit the poor will require solving the persistent problems that block development of the sector as a whole and that make it hard for poor households to take advantage of existing forestry opportunities. Geske Dijkstra is somewhat more optimistic in her story about gender and the PRS process. She examines to what extent the PRS process has helped address gender inequality in Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua, by changing policies, by strengthening the womens movement or by providing womens organizations with more voice in the public policy debate. Initial PRS consultation processes provided little effective opportunity for voices from the womens movement to be heard, and the PRSPs themselves did little to advance concerns about gender inequality. Yet, some later PRS-related participatory processes gave womens organizations a chance to engage with policy makers on issues of policy. And in all three countries, womans organizations were involved in the elaboration of official specific woman or gender equity plans. Dijkstras account also illustrates how the general political climate affects the extent to which gender interests are integrated into public policies. Kristin Komives studies the legacy of the PRS process on formal social accountability in Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua. She finds that PRS-related participatory processes and participatory bodies strengthened civil society actors and created space for them to interact with government actors in discussions about plans and strategies. Nonetheless, as the PRSPs did not reflect real government priorities, civil society actors could not hold governments accountable for their policy agendas by simply participating in the development of a PRSP. Nor is there much evidence that governments were held to account for achieving development results: civil society actors showed less interest in monitoring government actions than in continuing to influence strategy development.
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Komives and Dijkstra In the final paper in the collection, Joa o Guimara es and Nestor Avendan o use Nicaragua as a test case for the PRS approach. They argue that the lack of progress in poverty reduction in Nicaragua during the period of study cannot be explained simply by poor implementation of, or internal contradictions between, core PRS principles. They conclude that poverty reduction was not a priority of the government, the World Bank, or the IMF. The Nicaraguan government retained strong donor support throughout the study period, even though Nicaraguas two PRSPs prioritized growth and the modernization of the State and most of the debt relief and development assistance linked to the PRSP was not directed to the poor.

Overarching Messages
As the ultimate goal of the PRS approach was to reduce poverty, one would like to be able to show tangible results based on reliable data. Evaluating the effect of the PRS approach on poverty levels would always be difficult because the counterfactual is not known. But on top of that, income poverty data that are comparable over time are surprisingly difficult to come by in the countries studied here. In Guyana, no income poverty data were available for the post-PRSP period. In Nicaragua, post-PRS poverty data were delayed, disputed, and finally showed that poverty in Nicaragua had actually risen, at least for the period reviewed here. In general, the articles in this collection present a mumbled story about the effect of the PRS period on poverty and social welfare. Some social indicators increased over the period (though not necessarily at a faster rate than before the PRSPs) and others (such as some education indicators in Honduras and Nicaragua) actually declined. The Human Development Index increased in all three countries during the PRSP period, but not by as much or at the same rate as during the 1990s (Table 1). In short, the authors have found little hard evidence that the PRS process significantly improved development results. More importantly, however, the articles in this collection indicate that the PRS process has severe limitations as an approach for encouraging effective poverty reduction. They provide little reason to believe that requiring medium- to long-term poverty reduction strategies and requiring that aid be based on those strategies will make development assistance more effective now or in the future. This draws into question the decision to continue to pursue this approach, albeit with some modifications, in the Accra Agenda for Action. One core problem is clearly that the PRS process encourages a focus on planning and producing strategy papers, more than on implementation or achieving outcomes. Huge amounts of energy were invested in the creation of short-term strategies. National ownership or more critically, high-level political ownership of the original PRSPs was

Table 1: Human development index Country Honduras Bolivia Guyana Nicaragua 1990 0.495 NA 0.472 0.545 2000 0.552 0.593 0.552 0.512 2010 0.604 0.643 0.611 0.565

Source: UNDP International Human Development Indicators.

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Legacy of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Process in Latin America weak and short-lived. New governments quickly rejected the PRSPs (and even related sectoral plans) in favor of their own political programs. In Bolivia, this ultimately meant rejecting even the idea of having a PRSP. In Honduras, there was pressure from civil society to maintain the original PRSP, but, even there, government officials found ways to expand and modify the strategy. The tendency was to move away from strategies focused on poverty reduction to more comprehensive national development strategies. This move was attractive to many actors for many reasons. Donors, civil society members and ministers could find a place for their key priorities in an enlarged strategy. Government officials could include more of their political priorities and, in some cases, return to national planning traditions that pre-dated the PRS approach. An expanded PRS also meant that one could justify using aid money for a wider range of programs, including traditional economic development and infrastructure projects. Even as the scope of the strategies was increasing, implementation proved to be challenging. A few new flagship programs were successfully started, and advances were made in areas where the PRS or the PRS approach coincided with political priorities or existing national programs, for example, Nicaraguas work on the modernization of state systems or Bolivias pre-PRS experience with institutionalized public participation. But in general, implementation primarily meant a lot of continuation of pre-PRS programs, with the pre-PRS weaknesses. Several papers in this collection show that the PRS process did not successfully address important institutional constraints, making implementation efforts less effective than they could have been. Implementation effectiveness did not seem to be the primary concern of the major actors involved in the process. In general, implementation (as well as monitoring and evaluation) took a back seat among government officials, donors and civil society actors alike, in favor of continual discussion about how to change or improve the strategies. Ironically, all of the policy discussion does not appear to have generated break-through solutions to persistent poverty problems. The articles in this collection show many examples notably in rural development and forestry where the strategies, even on paper, were not ambitious enough to tackle root problems. Civil society members complained that some core issues such as macroeconomic policies were off the table in initial PRS discussions. The process did not generate space or a structure to adequately address these issues in subsequent rounds. As Vos shows in his article, it seems unlikely that the countries have found a sustainable approach to achieving continued improvement in social indicators or reducing income poverty. The inability to effectively address complex and contentious political issues through the multi-stakeholder processes associated with the PRSs is clearly another core weakness of the approach, one that has been cited by other authors as well. However, this is not enough reason to write off the importance of the PRS participatory processes in the countries studied here. The PRS process brought opportunities for significant institutional strengthening for civil society groups, which could well have long-term effects on public policy dialogue. Moreover, the articles in this collection do show that some participatory processes successfully affected policy, most notably in Bolivia where the decision about how to spend HIPC II debt relief funds and some specific policy measures aimed to benefit local producers came out of participatory processes. How much influence civil society actors had depended on government commitment to participation and to the specific policy ideas being discussed, on the degree of donor backing for civil society actors, and the leverage that civil society groups could exercise (for example, because donors insisted on participation). All three factors varied tremendously over the time period and across countries.
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Komives and Dijkstra As governments changed, and political support for the PRSPs and the PRS process changed over time, donors struggled to find a way to adapt to the changing environment. Evolutions in aid and donor behavior during the PRS period were not consistent across countries. Some national donor groups insisted on a PRSP; others were more flexible in what could be called a poverty reduction strategy. Some insisted on broad participation; others accepted much less. Budget support was provided in some cases when countries did not strictly meet the requirements and not provided when countries were much closer to having achieved the pre-requisites. Progress towards donor harmonization and alignment was slow in all cases, but took different paths in each country. The precise mix of donors in each country had an influence on these choices, as did the leverage that the donor community as a whole had (higher in highly aid dependent countries like Nicaragua and Guyana than in Honduras and Bolivia). Overall, given donors own need to base their aid on the PRSPs, the tendency was to find a way to justify continued aid. This meant that governments did have moments of leadership over aid relations, even if these did not follow the model envisioned in the PRS process (leadership exercised through a medium-term plan). Still, it is clear that donors and the international financial institutions exercised considerable influence over the content of the original PRSPs and, to a varying degree, over subsequent strategies a fact well established in other studies. This was of limited relevance for actual policy implementation, however, given the general weaknesses of the PRSPs. A more effective tool for influencing policy implementation was the policy matrix that accompanied major aid programs, particular general and sectoral budget support. Civil society groups did not participate in the development of these matrices. Looking to the future, one thing is certain: the role of traditional donors in bringing about pro-poor policy change will be more limited than it was over the last decade. With external debts significantly reduced and the entrance of new donors in the region, in particular Venezuela, the traditional donors have much less influence on the agenda. This change was already starting to be visible in the period covered by the articles in this collection. In addition, several of the bilateral donors that were very influential during the PRS process have withdrawn or are withdrawing from these countries: the United Kingdom from Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua; and Sweden from Honduras and Nicaragua. The Netherlands will also most likely withdraw from the region. This leaves the multilateral institutions and the European Union as important players, and the United Kingdom in Guyana. Changes in the donor community will undoubtedly lead to changes in the dynamics of government-donor relationships in each country, most likely in the direction of reducing adherence to PRS process principles. Whether this means a renewed focus on individualized donor action and project funding or donors are able to continue to work towards harmonization and alignment outside the PRS frame remains to be seen.

Acknowledgement
This special issue would not have been possible without the support of the Swedish Agency for International Development. SIDAs decision to monitor the PRS process in Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua over a 5-year period was the inspiration for this set of articles and the source of funding for much of the research presented here. Special thanks go to Johanna Teague and Marcela Lizana for their support and guidance.
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Kristin Komives International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Geske Dijkstra Public Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

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