PRSP's & Mainstreaming
Guided by the World Bank, poor nations are drawing up formal plans called poverty reduction strategy papers, or PRSPs that describe how they envision creating the conditions for growth and social development that will raise incomes and lower national poverty rates. PRSPs themselves represent a significant step toward development that can benefit the poor. They arose out of the realization that the structural economic reforms recommended in earlier decades by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—polices such as market liberalization, and an emphasis on export-oriented trade—had not yet produced enough growth in many lesser-developed nations to result in sufficient progress against poverty. Therefore, the Bank and the IMF have encouraged poor nations to draw up their own blueprints for poverty reduction through a process of national consultation. The hope is that these self-generated strategies will better engage poor nations’ poverty reduction efforts and provide a guide for development aid from the World Bank and wealthy nations.
However, these initial attempts at poverty reduction strategies have taken little note of the centrality of ecosystems in the lives of the poor and the need to enhance the ability of the poor to govern them as sustainable sources of income. Analysis has shown that environmental concerns are often poorly mainstreamed in PRSPs, although this is beginning to change as PRSPs mature from draft to final versions. Still, they usually contain few time-bound targets for improved environmental conditions or better resource management.
Since PRSPs provide a national roadmap to poverty reduction, it is particularly important that they do a better job of highlighting the role of natural resources in rural development, and prioritizing the need to strengthen local capacity to manage ecosystems. This means they must find betteer methods of decentralizing control over natural resources to local communities in a way that empowers the poor rather than simply transferring power to local elites. PRSPs must also adopt a long-term perspective that identifies lasting poverty reduction with sustainability, rather than focusing completely on short-term economic growth.
