A Bigger Role for Legislatures

• Author: Frederick C. Stapenhurst and Riccardo Pelizzo
• Position: Senior Public Sector Management Specialist in the World Bank Institute/PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University and a consultant in comparative legislative systems

As elected representatives, legislatures should be involved in developing national poverty reduction strategies and overseeing their implementation.

The international community has changed its approach to poverty reduction over the past decade. Instead of developing programs for poor countries to execute, it now requires that these countries take the lead in formulating poverty reduction strategies.

The turning point was the World Bank's launch, in 1998, of the Comprehensive Development Framework, which emphasized the interdependence of all elements of development-social, structural, human, governmental, environmental, economic, and financial-as well as the importance of countries' directing and "owning" their development agendas and antipoverty programs. The following year, the World Bank and the IMF developed a tool for implementing the framework-a national Poverty Reduction Strategy, which is formalized in a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Low-income countries receiving debt relief or loans from either institution must develop PRSPs with input not only from donors but also from their own citizens and civil society to ensure broad political support for antipoverty programs.

The PRSP approach has heightened interest in national budgets for two reasons. First, the allocation of budget resources to poverty reduction, which is contingent on two key aspects of the PRSP process (see diagram)-a country's diagnosis of domestic poverty and its formulation of antipoverty strategies-reflects the government's understanding of the problems it faces and the solutions it proposes. Second, the availability and allocation of budget resources say a lot about whether, how, and to what extent a government is able and determined to implement its propoor policies.

[ SEE THE GRAPHIC AT THE ATTACHED RTF ]

According to the constitutions of most countries, the legislature is the representative institution charged with holding governments accountable for achieving the objectives set forth in the PRSP; this mandate typically allows legislatures to represent the wishes and concerns of their constituents to the government and mediate between them. Legislatures in most countries also have the constitutional right to oversee national budgets-reviewing whether the government's allocation of resources is consistent with their constituents' demands as well as with the country's developmental objectives, scrutinizing government...