Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers: A Poor Package for Poverty Reduction

This paper challenges the stated nature of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) as participatory and country-owned, asserting that the IMF and World Bank still use conditionalities to implement policies that ignore past failures and disregard individual country circumstances. The paper concludes that neither civil society nor government wishes are incorporated into PRSP-mandated policy action. Further, it is suggested that international donors may inhibit the participatory civil society-government relationship.