AN EXERCISE IN WORLDMAKING 2009 - ISS

7 Does the Aid Consensus Shift from Washington to the South? 79
on reconstruction and reconciliation and it has been internationally
commended for its results. Rwanda reached the Highly Indebted Poor
Countries initiative completion point under its first PRSP in 2005 and is
now in the Multilateral Debt Relief initiative. The second EDPRSP is
less rooted in a post-conflict context and therefore more suitable for
analysis.
Washington, Rwanda
Given the critical literature on the oxymoron between conditionalities
and country ownership of the document discussed above, it would be
realistic to assume that at least some of the neoliberal policy recommendations
can be found. Such a hypothesis is confirmed by the following
remark on the process of writing the first PRSP:
There followed considerable debate over several months, particularly with
the IMF, mainly concerning the macroeconomic framework and the deployment
of three expenditures scenarios. The World Bank also had concerns
about some of the sectoral substance, about the need for more
prominent attention for governance as a set of cross-cutting issues, and
more minor matters of presentation. In March 2002, the Bank insisted
that the PRSP be revised before it could be submitted for endorsement
(Golooba Mutebi et al 2003: 257).
Furthermore, compliance to IFI standards can be expected in the Latent
South Consensus as well, as is explained above. And indeed, some
of the neoliberal policies and theories from the past are reflected in
Rwanda’s EDPRSP. In the introduction already one can read Rwanda’s
compliance to some of the foundation values of the IFIs, such as transparency,
efficient administration, respecting intellectual property rights,
respecting the rule of law and others (Government of Rwanda [GoR]
2007: 1-4).
In the evaluation of its former PRSP (2002-2005) the neoliberal accomplishments
are explicitly stated, such as the privatisation efforts by
the Privatisation Secretariat for example (ibid.: 35). Furthermore, it
makes the claim that both privatisation and liberalisation efforts for the
period 2002-2005 led to greater private investments (ibid.: 18). As Sumner
(op. cit.) points out, this might explain why these policies are not
mentioned often in the remain of the document (the policies for 2008-
2012).