Informal Workshop on Poverty Reduction Strategies, CDF and nssds

DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE COMMITTEE
Senior Level Meeting, 12-13 December 2000, (ROOM DOCUMENT No. 1)

Informal Workshop on Poverty Reduction Strategies,
Comprehensive Development Framework and
National Strategies for Sustainable Development:
Towards Convergence

The Workshop was held from 28-29 November 2000 at the OECD under the Chairmanship of Jean Claude Faure, Chairman of the DAC. 81 participants attended, including representatives from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Bolivia, and Vietnam. The summary of these discussions has not yet been fully discussed among workshop participants. This draft signals the main conclusions to SLM participants as background to their discussions.

INFORMAL DAC WORKSHOP ON POVERTY REDUCTION STRATEGIES,
THE COMPREHENSIVE DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK AND
NATIONAL STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT:
TOWARDS CONVERGENCE

The DAC Working Party on Development Co-operation and Environment, in collaboration with the DAC Poverty Network, organised an informal workshop on 28/29 November 2000. This aimed to provide an opportunity for DAC members and representatives from developing country partners, the IBRD, IMF and the UN to identify ways of fostering convergence between the various planning frameworks such as National Vision, Agenda 21, the Comprehensive Development Framework and the Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRSPs). The objectives of the workshop were to:

The main conclusions from the workshop were:

1. Convergence in the underlying principles for the various strategies or processes is more important than what strategies are called.

2. Although there is broad agreement on these underlying principles, development agencies and developing country partners are still learning how to put them into practice effectively.

3. Issues relating to the environment and other aspects of sustainable development need to be integrated into the national country strategy process, and not dealt with separately.

4. There is a particular opportunity at present to promote the better integration of environmental and sustainability issues into poverty reduction strategies currently under preparation. PRSPs should evolve into long-term sustainable poverty reduction strategies.

5. The formulation of a national development strategy should be based around an inclusive process of national dialogue between government, the private sector and civil society more broadly, and embrace medium and longer term perspectives.

6. Development agencies should support upstream analytical work for building consensus on policy options, and enhancing capacity.

7. There is a need for development agencies to better adapt their assistance strategies to existing strategic planning framework of the country concerned. They otherwise risk undermining the governments they seek to support.

8. The draft DAC Guidelines on Poverty Reduction make important suggestions as to how development co-operation can adapt to the demands of partnerships for poverty reduction. Their wide application can play an important role in fostering this integration.

9. The conclusions of this workshop should be considered for incorporation in both the poverty and sustainable development guidelines.

One in five of the world's population lives in absolute poverty, on less than $1 a day. Natural resources are under intense pressure. The challenge of sustainable development remains enormous. The world community has agreed a set of international development targets for all countries, the achievement of which requires concerted action on poverty reduction, environment, education, health, and gender equality.

One of the targets calls for a national strategy for sustainable development (nssd) to be in place in all countries by 2005. Such strategies aspire to certain principles, in particular a participatory process for integrating economic, social and environmental priorities. These principles are also being applied in developing countries through the large number of existing country-level frameworks, such as National Visions, Agenda 21, the Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF) and most recently, for low income countries, Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS). Most of these initiatives have a number of common objectives and characteristics. The basic intention behind all of them is to set a solid, comprehensive, and commonly agreed framework for the development process, thereby improving the institutional and political conditions of the countries concerned, as well as increasing transparency and enhancing donor co-ordination. None of these processes are objectives in themselves. Rather, they are vehicles for participatory strategic planning to promote sustainable development and poverty reduction.

It is important that developing countries are not faced with the challenge of having to develop many different strategic frameworks, especially if these are driven from outside. Given the current focus of international effort and resources on poverty reduction strategies, it is important for these frameworks also to incorporate sustainable development principles. The in-country dialogues on nssds conducted by the Working Party on Development Co-operation and the Environment have borne this out. (Eight country case studies have been conducted: Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Nepal, Tanzania, Thailand, Ghana, Namibia and Pakistan.)

The workshop included presentations and working group discussions on the Comprehensive Development Framework, poverty reduction strategies, national strategies for sustainable development, the links between environment, poverty and development, and the potential for convergence. Of the six developing countries in attendance, Uganda and Bolivia formally presented their experiences.

Two groups discussed these themes. Sustainable development has economic, social, environmental and institutional aspects. It seeks to ensure that the use of resources in the present does not undermine the needs of future generations. It was concluded that in the long-term the needs for poverty reduction do coincide with sustainable development. In the short term, there are also many areas of consistency and complementarity. But there are potential conflicts, as many poor people depend on natural resources, and poverty can force environmentally damaging practices.

The overarching goal should be reducing and then eradicating poverty in the context of sustainable development. Poverty reduction is sometimes (wrongly) placed in a short term context, particularly when there is considerable pressure for a PRS to be produced very quickly. The groups recommended that developing the PRS should be an action-learning process. In spite of the short-term pressure for interim PRSPs for debt relief attention should still be paid to issues of sustainable development in these PRSPs, which should evolve into longer-term sustainable poverty reduction strategies. Economic and sector work need to take account of long-term sustainability and identify trade-offs between poverty and sustainable development. Having strategies for sustainable development does not just mean having poverty and environmental strategies. At present issues around sustainable development and the environment are often ignored in PRSPs. So in developing future PRSPs, and other strategies, it is vital to grasp the opportunity to ensure that sustainable development principles are incorporated, along with appropriate indicators.

There are many interactions between poverty and the environment. The three main areas identified were:

§ Health – such as disease, sanitation, vector-borne diseases, indoor/outdoor air pollution etc. One quarter of disease can be attributed to environmental causes.

§ Livelihoods – e.g. loss of local natural resources such as land and soil degradation, groundwater.

§ Vulnerability – e.g. disproportionate impact of environmental hazards and natural disasters.

In addition poverty has an impact on the environment, e.g. deforestation resulting in soil erosion and climate change, and the use of cheap but polluting fuels.

It is important to take stock of and build on existing environmental strategies, for example the action plans produced under the aegis of the desertification convention or national environmental action plans, and to identify gaps. Stakeholder consultation in developing the PRS should be broad and include civil society and organisations with environmental interests. Based on this, it is important to identify how environmental activities can assist poverty reduction in developing the PRS. The environment chapter of the PRSP sourcebook provides some guidance on this. Some specific suggestions were to:

§ Apply poverty reduction strategies from an environment and sustainable development perspective, in order to inform decision-making and to better understand the trade-offs between poverty and environment.

There was extensive discussion on the issue of ownership, which is closely related to the issue of convergence. Most of the points made were not unique to these comprehensive planning processes, but apply more broadly in development and development co-operation as has been stressed by the DAC. In many countries there is a significant problem of lack of country ownership. In some countries it is because of serious governance issues such as violent conflict. In many other countries, reasons include time pressures, the need to respond to external requirements, the adherence to labels, development agencies wanting their own processes and identifiable projects, lack of transparency and accountability in promoting these agendas, and limited capacity in-country. These then often result in local institutions being bypassed by rushed country missions. This can lead to ‘policy and institutional inflation’ and an associated ‘capacity collapse’. However, capacity needs to be looked at a country level, and not confined to government or the wider public sector. In fact, capacity is often under-utilised in the private sector and civil society.

Partner governments need to take responsibility for setting their own agendas and priorities, and ensuring that donor funding fits into those frameworks. The Uganda case study presented in the workshop provided a good model of how this could happen, where the government’s own Poverty Eradication Action Plan incorporated elements of the CDF, and became the PRSP.

The partnership tends to be unequal as money comes from the public purse in donor countries and there will always be a requirement for some kind of accountability. However this can be applied with a light touch, for example only excluding those projects and programmes which ‘fly in the face of economic (or other) logic’, such as their likely sustainability. Development agencies need to recognise that to help institutions to develop, thrive and be sustainable. As stressed in the Draft DAC Guidelines on Poverty Reduction and the Draft DAC Guidance on Strategies for Sustainable Development, it is important to respect and build on countries’ existing processes and strategies, and help those to develop, even if they are not perfect. To do this development agencies need to loosen their control and take a longer term perspective. Development agencies may subscribe to this type of argument but putting it into in practice is still a frontier. There needs to be a partnership agreement based on transparency, accountability on both sides and joint monitoring. Some specific suggestions for the DAC were:

The question of capacity underlay much of the discussion in the workshop. The discussion strongly supported, and in part deepened, the broad “common ground” that has been developed by the DAC. There is a need to help build and effectively utilise sustainable capacity in developing countries to take on the tasks flowing from more effective country ownership. The way development agencies have worked has often led to institutional weakening, e.g. through overloading institutions with diverse programmes and demands, encouraging parallel processes, undermining decision-making, and poaching the best staff from government. This is interlinked with in-country interests, such as entrenched hierarchies, and low morale in the public sector. This makes it easier for a fragmented approach to happen, where almost any aid is accepted, regardless of whether it builds capacity and ownership, or whether it is poverty-focused or sustainable. Some suggestions of the group were to:

There is currently insufficient convergence of the different planning frameworks. This leads to the potential for duplication, competition, and the waste of scarce administrative and intellectual resources. The question is whether it is practical to merge these frameworks and to converge on a single goal. The conclusion of the workshop was that this is not feasible. But it is feasible to converge on a set of principles to help inform country owned that flow from a shared country vision. The labels of individual frameworks are less important. The principles they attempt to promote do need to be looked at, and their differing objectives.

In reality most of the frameworks under consideration at this workshop have many common principles. These are well illustrated in the Uganda and Tanzania papers, which compared the different principles. Experience in Uganda demonstrates that these principles can be applied in practice, but this remains an exception.

Convergence/coherence comes from working out of, and adjusting to, country realities, vision and capacities. This can be most effective if based on a national dialogue to set a national vision, as in Ghana. Government then can decide on programmes of action to pursue, to achieve objectives of poverty reduction, growth and sustainable development. These programmes need to be translated into budgets, including medium-term expenditure frameworks, policies and implementation plans. . Donor country strategies should then be the operational vehicle for supporting these. The concern for the environment and sustainable development should pervade all plans, which would need to show their impacts in the short and long term.

Partners need to take these shared principles seriously and commit to them, using them to assess their support for strategies, and to see how their own operational mechanisms support or hinder their implementation, e.g. incentive systems for staff.

A full report of the workshop will be made available subsequently. The conclusions of the workshop will feed into further development of the guidelines for both poverty reduction and sustainable development strategies. Both will be presented for endorsement at the DAC High Level meeting in April 2001. Further informal contacts will also be held among the practitioners of the various frameworks to encourage further convergence, particularly in the context of the preparatory processes for the Rio + 10 Conference to be held in mid-2002.

		Updated 10 June, 2003