This commentary is based on interviews conducted in June-September 2006, with a number of civil society representatives and members of the main drafting team for the PRSP. Interviews were recorded with their prior consent. Only a couple of them requested that responses on specific issues should not be used or kept anonymous. Obviously the interpretive responsibilities are solely mine. As this paper has been written in a commentary format references are not used apart from a few quotations. For any further references or details on source of information I can be contacted by the above email address.
1.1 Ownership or stamping?
It is very important to understand why the government of Bangladesh was very keen and clear on claiming ownership of its PRSP. Ownership does not mean conforming to someone else's idea and taking initiatives to implement that. The PRSP is not Bangladesh 's own concept and it just portrays the approach and programmes suggested by the World Bank and IMF. A central document and strategy on poverty reduction may be useful in a country context, but the need for such a document is felt locally; by local researchers, academics, development activists and policy-makers. Clearly, the PRSP of Bangladesh has not been prepared from such feelings. Instead it was pushed towards the government by external actors. The whole idea of ownership of the PRSP (in the Bangladesh case) is therefore a contested one. On the one hand, there is a claim that the PRSP of Bangladesh is solely owned by the Government of Bangladesh and has been prepared by local consultants with financial support from local resources. On the other hand, the idea of ownership has been criticised on account of the framework's origins. Obviously, the idea of preparing a PRSP was not originated by the Government of Bangladesh. The donors wanted a coherent strategy for their assistance programmes and therefore suggested that governments formulate poverty reduction strategies. Critics have observed the PRSP is nothing but just one further document prepared for the donors to get money from them.
In Bangladesh , previous development and poverty reduction programmes were focused and based on national Five Year Plans where poverty reduction was the top agenda item. This clears up the issue that attempts at poverty reduction have a long history in Bangladesh . The history of economic thought in the country shows that it has always lived and dwelled on poverty. The objectives of poverty reduction and/or alleviation and addressing the issues of poor people, have always been at the forefront, all through political economy and development thinking, particularly in the Five Year Plans along with related development programmes. Nevertheless, the question is whether the idea of a Five Year Plan was Bangladesh 's own? Historically, from the very beginning as Bangladesh set off as a nation state it was highly reliant on donors and foreign assistance due to a war ravaged vulnerable economy. The Five Year Plans were the reference point for both the state and the donors to kick-off with lending and assistance programmes. It is very well known that donors required such a document specifying what various lending and non-lending operations could take place, and that is how the Five Year Plans were made. The question arises again as to why it was necessary to prepare a new poverty reduction strategy and halt further continuity with Five Year Plans. Critics found that this was demanded by the donors. They wanted the country to shift from old practices and to prepare a new policy, and the government had to do so and this was the rationale of the PRSP approach.
“…there is nothing absolutely new here and no fundamental difference can be found between the Five Year Plans and the PRSP” (Ahmed M. 2006).
“…it seems the same old thing in a new cover, with a new logo as dictated by the donors” (Islam N. 2006).
It was obvious that the government of Bangladesh did not prepare the PRSP willingly or enthusiastically. They were obliged to create such a document and prepared one, and the claim of ownership is more like rubber stamping as a pre-condition.
“…the ownership was like someone has drafted or issued a letter and someone else had to put his/her signature below that. If this equals ownership then the PRSP of Bangladesh is owned by the government in the same way” (Yunus M. 2006).
The whole process was accomplished in two ways. First, the government had to claim ownership for the donors' approval and did so accordingly. Secondly, the Bank and Fund needed this attestation and they made the government put its stamp on the PRSP.
1.2 The PRSP of Bangladesh - there was ad-hoc participation, not enough participation
The PRSP of Bangladesh has been claimed as locally owned as it was prepared by local consultants and researchers, and was financed by the Government of Bangladesh. The main drafting team for the PRSP was very independent and there were no interruptions or dictations from any part of the government or the ministries involved in the process, explained the team members.
“…the team comprised local experts and enjoyed the freedom of finding out the problems as well as the solutions for the proposed poverty reduction strategy and therefore the criticism about the PRSP being a donor driven strategy will be an incorrect statement” (Siddiqui K. N. 2006).
People who believe the PRSP to be a locally owned policy, however, acknowledge that to shift to preparing a PRSP from the previous practice of Five Year Plans was because of the donors' pressure.
“…it was impossible to disagree to prepare a PRSP on a technicality; it was a condition for maintaining lending and non-lending operations with the donors. The government accepted that the PRSP had to be made and thereafter Bangladesh was in the driving seat and prepared the PRSP with locally well known experts and researchers without any influence by the donors or the government bureaucrats” (Ahmed Q. M. 2006).
However, the basic question about the ownership of PRSP relies on the acknowledgement of these people that it was prepared as a condition for maintaining loans and debts. To illustrate, when a framework is already designed outside and has to be accepted for explicit or implicit reasons; it cannot be owned locally. The situation in this regard can be perceived in a citation of a BIDS researcher, who insisted categorically that the Finance Minister in a meeting with BIDS researchers; told them that he (the Finance Minister) did not believe in the PRSP.
“…the then Finance Minister told us in that meeting, a PRSP is needed only to get the loans” (Anonymous 2006).
This view concurs with complaints that the PRSP was prepared to access the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) loan, not to introduce a better or effective public policy on national poverty reduction. An interesting observation is that, in recent years, dependence on donors had moved downwards continuously. There was time when the economy of Bangladesh was severely dependent on donor funds but recently this dependence became very low. Given this context, it was expected that the government would have been in a stronger position to bargain with the donors to discuss and debate the necessity of preparing a PRSP which they failed to do and instead agreed to prepare one.
Critics also question the ownership of a PRSP document based on its philosophical or theoretical origin in contrast to its claim of being a home-grown strategy. It has been argued that the PRSP approach is just a sugar-coated framework of the World Bank's Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) which had actually increased poverty in other poor countries as a consequence of the implementation of that framework. Therefore, the World Bank and IMF were not likely to gain credibility from poor countries with a replica of a similar approach. Hence, they came up with a framework that comprised all the components of their agendas but sarcastically covered these up with the notion of ownership by the national governments. The implicit objective of such chicanery was to avoid any responsibility for tentative malfunction as had happened in previous approaches. It is very deceptive in nature because the poor countries have to prepare a PRSP to get loans and debts, and the paper has to be endorsed or approved by the World Bank and IMF, but officially it has to be owned by the governments regardless of whether they genuinely feel the necessity for such a strategy. The claim of ownership of the PRSP is therefore another technical condition of getting loans.
The PRSP has to be prepared in a manner so that at the least the government can officially claim ownership, and therefore government's loud voice of claiming ownership is very visible in the document. It is no surprise because the terms and conditions were pre-designed. The government had to claim ownership as per these rules, despite knowing that they actually did not own it and had to come up with their good reasons such as, ‘ I t has been prepared with local researchers and finance was made by the government of Bangladesh' (Ahmad Q. K. 2006).
Serious questions have been raised about the type of participation, and it has been claimed that there was not even enough scope or space for participation in the whole process. It has been said that the need for a PRSP was not been felt through the participation of the people of Bangladesh . In a straightforward way, the PRSP approach came with a skeleton or structure from outside the country, and had to be accepted without any debate or question, and therefore genuine participation could not happen.
“…the idea of participation in the PRSP is something contradictory. Statements like ‘ PRSP should include participation from all possible stakeholders of the society ' means that first of all it confirms that the idea of preparing a PRSP must be accepted. Was there a slightest of option for any section of the society to make the decision whether the PRSP should be accepted or not? Whose participation has determined the necessity for a PRSP? The answer is no ones – therefore, whatever form of participation followed such a mechanism is equivalent to ‘no participation'. Any participation, regardless of how comprehensive, has no added value – all this was done for attestation” (Muhammad A. 2006).
Scepticism remains about whether the thematic reports (prepared by the BIDS as background papers for the PRSP) have actually been incorporated properly into the PRSP, as the consultants who drafted the PRSP did not include the researchers who prepared those reports. The PRSP also claims to have arisen from consultation and participation from all possible sectors of the society. Strong disagreement confronts such a claim. We can agree that it was not possible to consult everyone of 140 million people, but only six divisional meetings organised by district commissioners in hierarchical settings cannot possibly represent the population of the country. Consultations and meetings in poor people's own settings would have offered useful and in-depth insights into Bangladesh 's poverty and would have been possible within the time and resources spent on the PRSP. However, the major untold story is how the inputs of participation and consultation were absorbed into the PRSP. The suspicion is that nothing was done in that respect because it is simply unbelievable that any farmer would disagree with subsidisation, and no public sector worker (except a few groups of beneficiaries) would agree on privatisation. It is not true that the landless farmers did not demand land reform so that they could have a means to survive. The PRSP also does not narrate the pains and miseries of poor farmers, workers or housemaids and neither does it tell about their desires. If there were discussions with such groups their stories should have been in the PRSP. Ethnic minority representatives have also denied the claim of inclusion in the participatory process of PRSP. They explained that the process simply overlooked them, and the final PRSP referred to them at the last minute as a result of their own lobbying with donors and pressure groups who influenced the PRSP committee to include ethnic minorities somehow and somewhere in the process.
The inclusion of parliamentarians has also been queried by critics. It has been argued that, given the country context; a national poverty reduction strategy should be the first concern of the representatives of the people who are voted by the people as members of the parliament, and should be debated in parliament. At the same time, local government should play a major role, to help identify local problems and ways forward. Participation from local government is nowhere and the parliament played a very marginal role, and the inclusion off MPs through meetings with Standing Committees was nothing but a ‘token' as otherwise approval of the PRSP was not possible. The whole process of participation was a ‘ploy' ( chol ) because in case of participation from poor and other ordinary people, or in case of participation from civil society and other sectors, or in case of participation by parliament and parliamentarians, it achieved only the minimum that was absolutely necessary for authentication. Initially it was prepared by consultants and experts according to the outline of the donors with minimal participation. There were a few meetings and consultations with various selected groups to create a participatory facade while scepticism remains on how far these have contributed to the final version of the PRSP. Furthermore, all this was done in an ad-hoc way as if the number of meetings and participants were more important than the views generated from these meetings. Continue >>
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