Poverty Reduction: Organization and Management of the European Agencies

There has been a clear shift among the European development agencies in the 1990s towards greater commitment to poverty reduction objectives and only a few donors have bucked the poverty trend, the most obvious examples being France and Spain. The ‘committed’ donors have also shown a growing consensus on their stated operational aims for PR. Yet, the experience set out in the earlier chapters, if representative, also reveals surprisingly few examples of ‘good practice’ approaches being realized by these donors in their own poverty assessments, in their country strategies and dialogue processes or in their direct interventions on the ground relating to poverty reduction. A clear analysis of what poverty means, who the poor are, and which interventions are likely to benefit the poor most, is often strangely lacking. Even where poverty has been well conceptualized at headquarters level, as is the case for Denmark, Germany and Sweden, donor country strategies remain disappointingly short on strategic thinking. Part of the explanation for this seems to lie in the organizational structure and management systems of the donor agencies themselves.1