Abstract
Introduced in 1999, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) created hopes of a significant change in development cooperation and in the fight against poverty. Often, however, these hopes led to disappointment. In Nicaragua, despite the adoption of a PRSP in 2001 and conditions that seemed favourable to poverty reduction, poverty actually increased between 2001 and 2005. The article views implementation of the PRSP in Nicaragua as a policy experiment, reviews the main aspects of the PRSP process over the period 2000–2007, analyses the factors underlying the increase in poverty and draws lessons from the experiment, particularly concerning the real priorities of both the government and the donors. It concludes that it seems neither cynical nor particularly far-fetched to see the introduction of PRSPs largely as an elaborate public relations exercise designed to keep in place the essentials of structural adjustment at a time when they were coming under increasingly strong criticism.
Introduits en 1999, les DSRPs ont engendré des espoirs de changements significatifs dans la coopération pour le développement et dans la lutte contre la pauvreté. Souvent, cependant, ces espoirs ont été déçus. Au Nicaragua, malgré l′adoption en 2001 d′un DSRP et des conditions qui semblaient propices à une réduction de la pauvreté, cette dernière s′est en fait accrue entre 2001 et 2005. Cet article envisage la mise en œuvre du DSRP au Nicaragua comme un essai de politique passe en revue les principaux aspects du processus de DSRP pendant la période 2000–2007, analyse les facteurs sous-tendant la montée de la pauvreté, et tire des leçons de cet exercice, notamment en ce qui concerne les priorités réelles du gouvernement ainsi que des donateurs. Nous concluons qu′il ne semble ni excessif de considérer l′introduction des DSRPs comme étant, en grande partie, un exercice élaboré de relations publiques conçu pour maintenir l′essentiel de la réforme structurelle, à un moment où cette dernière suscitait des critiques grandissantes.
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Notes
See Guimarães and Avendaño (2003, 2006, 2007, 2008) and Guimarães et al. (2004). These reports can be downloaded from the Sida web site or from www.iss.nl/cross_cutting_themes/prsp.
This period goes from 2000, when the first version of the Nicaraguan PRSP was formulated, to January 2007, when a Sandinista government returned to power and introduced substantial policy and political changes.
Booth's labelling is not entirely innocent: he both claims for his approach the middle ground and describes as ‘cynical’ and ‘naïve’ the other perspectives mentioned, when these labels would only be justified if those perspectives followed purely from preconceived ideas.
See, for instance, World Development Movement (2005), especially Tables 2 and 3.
ERCERP – Estrategia Reforzada de Crecimiento Económico y Reducción de la Pobreza.
Donors were partly responsible for this, as they pressed for ‘their’ projects to be kept within the strategy.
The ERCERP proposed to allocate HIPC resources to a few priority social programmes, including a programme aiming at extending social services in key municipalities, with 38 per cent of the HIPC resources allocated in 2002, the conditional cash transfer programme (social protection network) with 14 per cent, and the rural development fund (for the development of small enterprises) and a programme to reduce urban poverty, with 10 per cent each. Other programmes addressed development needs of the Atlantic coast and the education and health sectors.
It did not help that the strategy was first drafted in English.
The open unemployment rates reported by the Central Bank of Nicaragua of 6.5 per cent in 2004, 5.6 per cent in 2005 and 5.2 per cent in 2006 are not credible, because they result from a single survey carried out in November, when economic activity is normally at a peak. The 12.5 per cent mentioned is an estimate by Néstor Avendaño, using Okun's model.
In this the GoN, with the support of the IFIs, disregarded the wishes of the G-7 whose finance ministers agreed in July 1999, in Köln, Germany, that the benefits of debt relief should be used to assist the most vulnerable segments of the population.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank members of Sida's Latin America Department, without whose commitment and imagination a monitoring exercise lasting 5 years would have been impossible; Guillermo Lathrop, who contributed to the analysis of the PND; Kristin Komives, Geske Dijkstra and an anonymous reviewer, for useful comments.
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Guimarães, J., Avendaño, N. The Great Experiment: Testing the PRSP Approach in Nicaragua, 2000–2007. Eur J Dev Res 23, 319–336 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2010.50
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2010.50