Roundtable Topic 1: Country Ownership

This page comprises information on background resources for Roundtable 1, compiled by the United Nations Development Programme. It does not necesserily represent the views of the Third High Level Forum organizers.

To access detailed information on the background resources for National Development Strategies/PRSPs listed below, please visit the UNDP Aid Effectiveness Portal.

Background Resources: National Development Strategies/PRSPs

World Bank, “Results-Based National Development Strategies”, October 2007
In 2006, the World Bank conducted 62 country-level Aid Effectiveness Reviews, which were used to set the baseline for the first Paris Declaration indicator: “Partners have operational development strategies”. The individual country reports can be found here. They are desk reviews based on existing literature, but provide a useful overview of aid-effectiveness initiatives in each country. This draft report is a summary of the reviews. The assessment as to whether a country has an operational development strategy is based on 3 criteria: a unified strategic framework; prioritisation within that framework, and a strategic link to the budget. While all 62 countries were found to have made some progress, only 8 satisfied all three criteria, suggesting that Paris Declaration 2010 target (75 percent of partner countries with largely developed operational development strategies) is some way off being achieved. Establishing a link between the strategy and the budget remains difficult for most countries, leading in turn to poorly prioritised strategies.  Many countries still have multiple, parallel development strategies. The report notes that holistic development strategies should address cross-cutting issues like gender, HIV-AIDS and the environment. 

IMF and World Bank, “2005 Review of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Approach – Balancing Accountabilities and Scaling Up Results”, August 2005
This is an internal review of the PRSP approach carried out jointly by WB and IMF staff. It is a broadly positive assessment, suggesting that PRSPs have brought about a “fundamental change” in the relationship between low-income countries and donors. It found that while most PRSPs contained good qualitative and quantitative analysis of poverty, it was often hard to link that analysis to the policies selected.  Few countries had linked their PRSPs to the budgets through an MTEF. The process had created space for broader participation in the policy process, but there had been little public discussion of macroeconomic policy choices. Staff suggested a number of priorities for strengthening the PRSP approach, including strengthening the medium-term perspective, participation and budget linkages.

World Bank Operation’s Evaluation Department, “The Poverty Reduction Strategy Initiative: An Independent Evaluation of the World Bank’s Support through 2003”, 2004
Although somewhat dated, this independent evaluation of the World Bank’s support to the PRSP initiative is the most comprehensive available. It provides a more cautious assessment, finding considerable variation in the value of the initiative across different countries. It concluded: “The [PRSP] Initiative has added the most value in countries where government leadership and aid management processes were already strong. It has had less effect in countries with weak public sector capacity or with donor-dominated aid relationships. Where the government-donor dialogue was previously weak or donors continued to drive the agenda, PRSPs by themselves have not noticeably promoted donor coordination or increased government management of external assistance.” It found that ownership of the PRSP was strong among government agencies directly involved in its preparation, but faded across line ministries and sub-national government. Importantly, it found that some countries had included policies they thought donors expected to see, including an overall emphasis on the social over the productive sectors. The evaluation called for strengthening analytical underpinnings, growth policies and results focus. It found that, while the Bank had generally aligned its support to PRSPs, this had not involved much change in the content of its Country Assistance Strategies. 

Driscoll, Ruth with Alison Evans, “Second-generation Poverty Reduction Strategies: new opportunities and emerging issues”, Development Policy Review, Issue 23(1), 2005
This review by the United Kingdom’s official development think tank, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), concluded that the PRSP has begun to escape from its origins in HIPC and IFI conditionality, and become genuinely country owned. It found that second-generation strategies were more comprehensive and multi-sectoral, and have triggered a genuine shift in expenditure towards poverty reduction in health, education and transport. They had opened up the policy process and enabled civil society to engage in policy debates “on an unprecedented scale”. However, it also noted the tendency of PRSP units to act as “enclaves” within government, and for ownership to be limited to core central ministries. The lack of budget links had resulted in poor costing and prioritisation, while weaknesses in public-financial management systems made the strategies difficult to implement. While donors were making genuine efforts to align with PRSPs, it found that this was often a pro forma process of reformulating existing policies in PRSP language. It found that too much assistance was still provided off the budget, and was fragmented across too many sectors, programmes and projects. 

Oxfam International, “From ‘donorship’ to ownership? Moving towards PRSP Round Two”, Oxfam Briefing Paper, January 2004
Oxfam found that the PRSP initiatives had been disappointing in both process and content. It found that donors still wield too much control over policy content, through “backstage conditionality”.  It found that macroeconomic policies are still dictated by the IFIs, and are “antipathetic to the interests of poor people”. It found that PRSP content was limited to social-sector spending projects, with little discussion of key policy areas such as trade. It found that few PRSPs came anywhere near to mainstreaming gender. While some “female problems” were addressed, such as girls’ schooling and domestic violence, there was no systematic analysis of the causes of gender inequality. 

Rosa Alonso, Lindsay Judge & Jeni Klugman, “PRSPs & budgets: a synthesis of five case studies”, January 2005
This study, based on five case studies including Cambodia and Vietnam, is the most detailed and technical assessment of the challenges involved in linking PRSPs to the budget. It analyses problems such as weak budget classification, which prevents agencies from matching their spending to PRS priorities, poor reporting on budget execution, and the difficulties of monitoring the impact of expenditure on poverty reduction. It notes that, where government lacks the capacity to execute budgets as planned, there is little chance of holding them to account for development results. Overall, however, it found that there has been a significant absolute increase in pro-poor spending as a result of the PRSP initiative, especially in education, rural development and transport. It concludes that the findings are “highly encouraging, as the PRSP process in a short period of time has succeeded in difficult areas where traditional public sector reform initiatives had failed. In particular, we find evidence that it has increased the transparency, openness and pro-poor character of budgeting processes.”