New Poverty Reduction Strategies and the Missing Middle

Since the period of adjustment, international development practices have evolved rapidly. A new generation of poverty reduction strategies has been developed, and new approaches to public policies, in particular governance. This chapter explores the implications of these recent trends for the formulation and implementation of social policy in the South. The chapter first describes the theoretical approach of the post-Washington consensus, and the progress this entails in terms of broadbased and comprehensive approaches to development and poverty reduction. It discusses the increased attention to institutions in the reform debates, and reviews critiques of recent approaches. This section includes a discussion of the implications of the Monterey consensus, and of scaling-up aid and what this implies for public policy-making. The second section focuses on sector-wide approaches, which have recently not received as much attention as, for example, PRSPs, but which are crucial in a discussion that focuses on public policy capacity. Key questions in this section are whether these are compatible with a perspective that focuses on inter-sectoral public policy-making, and what the influence has been of recent ‘vertical’ initiatives, for example, in the case of HIV/Aids. Section 3 looks at Poverty Reduction Strategies as one of the major instruments put forward under the process of debt relief for heavily indebted countries. In particular, in the context of the argument in this book, we are interested in the experiences with participatory and comprehensive policy planning that were among the central tenets of the PRSP initiative. The fourth section concludes, looking at the recent debates on the scaling-up of aid, and the new challenges this poses for the main theme of this book.