The Poverty Reduction Strategy in Mozambique
The seemingly uncontroversial public life of the PRSP approach in Mozambique is analysed in this DIIS Working Paper. It is suggested that the approach embodies much of the Frelimo government's thinking about development since independence, though obviously 'packaged' to fit international donor discourses as they continually change. The PRSP is therefore not an outright 'imposition' on the Frelimo government or necessarily a 'challenge' to its sovereignty, as it is often argued.
In general the paper argue that the PRSP became over time a broad 'consensus document' because it came to potentially incorporate 'all' stakeholders' needs and wishes. It is argued that after the political turbulence of the 1980s and 1990s with privatisation and structural adjustments, the PRSP allowed for different elite groups to find common ground with regard to ideological and party-preserving concerns, as social and market-economic trade-offs could now be legitimately accommodated.
The working paper forms part of the outputs of the Elites, Production and Poverty collaborative research programme (EPP). The programme is based at DIIS in the Politics and Governance IO. It brings together research institutions and universities in Bangladesh, Denmark, Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda and is funded by the Danish Consultative Research Committee for Development Research. The program began in 2008 and runs until the end of 2011.
The research aims to produce a political economy analysis of what drives productive sector policy formulation and implementation. Our analysis focuses on elites and what they find desirable and feasible, because elites are central to economic development. The research program examines the role of elites in economic development in five developing countries.
The first set of papers generated by the program examines the internationally-driven New Poverty Agenda and its impact in our country studies. Besides the present paper four of the papers are now available as working papers (see box).