The Challenges of “Deliberative Development”: Bolivia’s Experience with a National Dialogue

The “deliberative development” approach to policy reform has gained popularity in both academic and policy circles without a clear understanding of the requirements for its success. Based on a reading of the deliberative democracy literature, we detail those requirements, finding them to be quite restrictive. We then examine Bolivia’s 2000 National Dialogue, a national deliberation on development policy, and find—not surprisingly—that these requirements wer generally missing. More importantly, we demonstrate that the lack of these requirements is not benign: the institutional characteristics of the Dialogue had direct effects, and the Dialogue continues to affect Bolivia’s politics in debatable ways. The late 1990s and early part of this decade witnessed what appeared to be a major change in the approach of international development institutions to policy reform. The most important evidence of this change was the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) initiative of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. This initiative, which arose in 1999 in the context of updating the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries’ (HIPC) Initiative, required countries to prepare a PRSP prior to receiving debt relief (see International Monetary Fund and International Development Association, 1999). Each country’s PRSP was to outline an overall strategy to reduce poverty, including structural reforms such as trade and privatization as well as specific anti-poverty programs. These PRSPs are now required to receive any World Bank or IMF concessional assistance. What made the PRSP initiative particularly innovative and noteworthy was that the Bank and Fund required that the strategy be developed in a “participatory” way. That is, the PRSP needed to be based on some sort of consultative process by which the government solicited input from various societal groups—including local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), businesses, and unions—and then incorporated those preferences in the policy. This approach to government policymaking seemed to go directly against a line of academic work on economic reform that had been influential in these institutions for years (e.g. Sturzenneger and Tommasi, 1998), arguing that there was an inverse relationship between the success of economic reform and the amount of participation of society in making policies. Having criticized this old approach for years, most NGOs and developing country governments supported the new direction taken by the World Bank and IMF. In fact, few critics of the approach (e.g. Stewart and Wang, 2003) have critiqued the idea of participation, most instead focusing their critiques on the poor “extent” and “quality” of participation. In one of the benchmark articles supporting this “deliberative” approach to policy reform, Peter Evans (2004) notes that such an approach to policymaking is supported by work by the economists Amartya Sen (1999) and Dani Rodrik (2000), who argue that participation and public deliberation are means to better policies. Evans writes, “If it were possible to implant this sort of deliberative process in political units large enough to impact developmental trajectories—say, the provincial or municipal level—we would have something that could be called ‘deliberative development’” (2004: 37). Discussing examples from Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Kerala, India, Evans goes on to argue that this type of development is not only desirable, but attainable. Despite its increasing popularity in the academic and policy worlds, we still know little about what is needed for the deliberative development approach to be successful. While it may be true that political processes in Porto Alegre, Kerala, and elsewhere have exhibited deliberative aspects as well as positive development outcomes, the particular details of how the former relates to the latter remain murky. Are deliberative processes appropriate for all development decisions? Are there particular characteristics of the society that need to be present in order for deliberation to work well? Are there particular characteristics of the deliberative institutions that need to be present? Can there be any negative effects if deliberation is not done well? If the deliberative development approach is to be considered a viable and superior policymaking alternative, these questions must be answered. To begin to answer these questions, this paper seeks to make three contributions. First, it reviews the goals a society might have that would lead it to prefer a deliberative policymaking processes over other types of policymaking processes. Deliberative processes may not be appropriate in all policymaking situations, and we therefore specify the potential advantages that deliberative processes contain. Second, building on that discussion, we lay out some of the societal and institutional characteristics necessary to ensure that the goals of deliberation are achieved. As such, we try to avoid defining “good” deliberative institutions according to their development outcomes. These first two contributions are based on a reading of an existing literature that is relevant to deliberative development but which has not been examined enough by the literature to date: the deliberative democracy literature largely spawned by the work of Habermas (1962; 1984). Our reading of this literature indicates that the conditions necessary to achieve the goals of deliberation are quite stringent and unlikely to be met in the majority of deliberative institutions. Because of this, a crucial question for scholars interested in deliberative development is what happens when these conditions are not met. Does deliberation produce positive development outcomes in any case? Therefore our third contribution is an empirical examination of a major deliberative development exercise: the 2000 National Dialogue in Bolivia. This event brought together thousands of citizens at the municipal, departmental (departments in Bolivia are akin to provinces), and national levels to discuss development policy. The Dialogue had a direct influence on national development, resulting in a Law of the Dialogue (La Ley del Diálogo) that continues to affect policy to this day. As such, Bolivia is what Rose (1991) refers to as a “prototypical” case, in the sense that it is among the countries that have traveled furthest along the path under study—in this case, the PRSP process. To paraphrase Rose, Bolivia’s present—affected by a past national deliberative development exercise—may be other countries’ future. This type of case study is well suited to an exploratory empirical analysis (King, et al., 1994), which this paper is. Our empirical analysis is based on extensive interviews conducted in Bolivia in 2002 and 2006 (the full list of interviewees is available from the authors). It examines the structural features of the deliberative process in Bolivia and how they relate to both the policies enacted during the process and the result of those policies in the subsequent years. We find that the policies of the National Dialogue in Bolivia have not been successful, and may in some ways be damaging to Bolivia’s developmental and democratic prospects. More importantly, the reasons for its unimpressive record are likely to be present in most deliberative development settings around the world. The paper proceeds as follows. The next section contains our analysis of the literature on deliberative democracy, including the goals of deliberation and the necessary conditions for attaining them. The third section contains our empirical analysis of Bolivia’s National Dialogue, and the fourth section examines the record of the policies that emerged from the Dialogue. A fifth section concludes.