Civil society participation in Rwanda’s Poverty Reduction Strategy

The participation conditionality linked to the PRSP creates a wide range of problems. It is too ambitious to be workable, too vague to be monitored. The pragmatic way out has been for the Breton Woods institutions to be uncommonly lenient in the verification of this conditionality. Governments can thus get away with a semblance of civil society consultation. Rwanda's a case in point. We try to show that there has been very little civil society participation, and that any other outcome would have been quite unlikely, possibly even undesirable. We argue that donors should dramatically tune down their ambitions, and set country-specific, limited but firm benchmarks that a government must respect in its relations with civil society. If this had been done from the initial stages of the Rwandan PRSP, some small but significant steps forward could have been taken that stand in stark contrast with the hollow 'participation' actually offered to civil society in some limited areas where it was not ready to rise to the challenge, while at the same time the donor community did little to protect civil society when the regime was clamping down on elementary civil liberties.