The New Conditionality: The politics of poverty reduction strategies

This book’s original impetus came, somewhat improbably, from a commissioned evaluation of the United Nations Development Programme’s work in Tanzania. United Nations country programmes much be reviewed every five years, and in 2001 I was asked to take part in an assessment of the UNDP’s achievements in Tanzania since 1997. At the outset I know only a little about Tanzania, much less about the UNDP, but in the course of thirty days of meetings and interviews in Dar es Salaam and Mwanza our team experienced an epiphany of sorts concerning radical changes underway in the world of development aid. We learned among other things how, during the previous five years, the United Nations’s important role as a countervailing force to the neo-liberal dictates of the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank) had evaporated. The UN – in which poor, indebted states like Tanzania have statutory representation on a vote per country basis – had been marginalized along with its development agency, the UNDP, while the World Bank the IMF – over which Tanzania had virtually no influence – had acceded to a position from which they could dictate the parameters of domestic development policy. A number of factors have contributed to the demise of the United Nations system as an alternative source of development funding and policy advice. Foremost among these is the failure of the United States to make good its financial commitments to the UN. By the time of our country review mission in Tanzania, the UNDP had ceased to be a funding agency and was subsequently reduced to ‘facilitating’ the ‘harmonization’ of donor activities in Tanzania; in effect, firming up the hegemonic role of the World Bank and the IMF in the realm of development policy and finance.