Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers: A Role for Civil Society?

Rosemary Mcgee

Chapter 9 in Development Planning and Poverty Reduction, 2003, pp 124-147 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Development rhetoric is now full of references to civil society. Precise definitions vary, but there is a broad consensus that this set of actors is vitally important in development. What is now called by this name has always been there, alleviating the privations of poverty, and striving to reduce it. The new departure in the 1970s and 1980s, when community participation first entered the development mainstream, was that actions by ‘civil society’ were suddenly recognised and commandeered by dominant institutions and harnessed to externally-defined objectives of development projects. The new departure today is that civil society actors are being ushered into debates on what poverty is, and which public actions must be prioritised to resolve it. As part of an evolutionary process described as the ‘scaling-up’ of participation from micro to macro-scale, or from ‘projects’ to ‘policy’ (Blackburn and Holland 1998, Harper 2001, Gaventa and Valderrama 1998), institutions everywhere are opening up spaces and inviting ‘civil society’ in to participate in policy-making for poverty reduction.

Keywords: Civil Society; International Monetary Fund; Poverty Reduction; Participatory Process; Civil Society Actor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-4039-4374-3_9

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DOI: 10.1057/9781403943743_9

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