From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

FROM POVERTY TO POWERWhen critics raise these issues, the response of the IFIs is usually,‘We have changed; these criticisms are out of date’. Indeed, the way theBank in particular works and thinks has moved on significantly (theFund is more resistant to change). In response to criticisms, bothinternal and external, the Bank pays much more attention to process,working closely with civil society organisations on topics such associal inclusion and accountability that would have cut little ice at theheight of the Washington Consensus in the 1980s and early 1990s.Unfortunately, Oxfam’s experience has been that this change in attitudeto process has not always been matched by changes in policyadvice to governments. In particular, in the case of economic conditionality,while there has been a reduction in the number of prioractions and triggers attached to World Bank lending that specifyeconomic policy reforms, conditions still routinely push specificeconomic policies. That experience has been borne out by the findingsof numerous external evaluations, suggesting that the barriers to changeare not just intellectual but political and institutional, and that deeperreform of the IFIs is urgently needed.In response to increasing evidence of the failure of adjustment todeliver growth and poverty reduction, and to the widespread publiccondemnation generated by the Jubilee 2000 campaign, in September1999 the Fund and the Bank announced that poverty reduction wouldbe placed at the heart of their policy design. They agreed that ‘nationallyownedparticipatory poverty reduction strategies should provide thebasis of all their concessional lending and debt relief’. In time, lendingby both institutions would be based on Poverty Reduction StrategyPapers (PRSPs), drawn up by country authorities for submission tothe Bank and Fund Boards. The IMF duly renamed its EnhancedStructural Adjustment Facility as the new, more wholesome-sounding,Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF).The Bank and, to a lesser extent, the Fund publicly acknowledgethat imposing a string of economic policy conditions on governmentsdoes not work. The Bank in particular has promised to greatly reducethe number of conditions it imposes, base them on assessments oftheir likely impact on poverty, and support only those that enjoygovernment ‘ownership’. Practice has fallen far short of official policy,however. Undertaking impact assessments to check what the effect300