PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

162 I PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
poverty (Draft guidelines: A human rights approach to poverty reduction
strategies, 2002. ).
This approach has the merit of departing from the notion of development as
charity and defining its objectives in terms of legally enforceable rights.
A key mechanism for the achievement of the MDGs in the seventy or so
poorest countries is the programme for national poverty reduction which goes
under the name of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). These are the
framework documents negotiated between governments and the World Bank
and IMF which provide the basis for debt relief and concessionary financing.
As a UNDP-NDI handbook on the PRSPs notes:
The PRSP is often the largest and most comprehensive economic policy
plan that any single government or parliament will need to manage.
Because it is so comprehensive and typically requires the passage of
enabling legislation and relevant appropriations, a fruitful PRSP
process revolves around the smooth exchange of information between
the executive and legislative branches. (Legislative-executive communication
on poverty reduction strategies, 2004)
However, even though the process involves international decisions with
enormous impact on domestic policy, parliaments have been left on the sidelines
so far. Although the World Bank has insisted from the outset that the
PRSPs should be ‘country owned’, the in-country consultations and the negotiations
with the international financial institutions have so far largely
bypassed parliaments, as the World Bank has itself acknowledged.
Parliamentary involvement has typically been limited to formal ratification of
the PRSPs, and to monitoring the financial aspects of their implementation
through the budget process. Even here, budgetary scrutiny of donor funds is
often taken over by the donors themselves.
In response to concerns about the limited role of parliaments in the first
phase of the PRSP programme, the World Bank has published its
Parliamentarians Guide to the World Bank (revised edition 2005). In actual
fact, there are some examples of more extensive involvement:
■ In Mauritania, parliamentarians were members of the PRSP working
groups and the committee monitoring the PRSP process. Parliamentarians
held a debate with NGOs and other civil society and development partners
before approving the PRSP.
■ In Honduras and Nicaragua, individual members of parliament played
important and active roles during the consultation process for the PRSP.