Difficult Partnerships: The World Bank, States, and NGOs

Latin American Politics and Society, Winter 2007 by Br�utigam, Deborah A, Segarra, Monique

ABSTRACT

Since the early 1990s, World Bank officials in many countries have pressed their government borrowers to include nongovernmental organizations as development partners. What impact has this new partnership norm had in the bank's borrower countries, and why? This article investigates these questions through longitudinal analysis of three cases: Guatemala, Ecuador, and the Gambia. In their first iteration in the 1990s, these bank-sponsored efforts generally failed to take root; yet by the 2000s, NGOs and state actors were engaged in multiple partnerships. This article suggests that over time, bank officials' repeated efforts to embed these new ideas fostered a social learning process that led NGOs to adopt more strategic partnership practices and government officials to see NGO partners as useful. Several factors may affect this learning process: levels of professionalism and the growth of professional networks, the presence of effective "bridge builders," and the level of historical conflicts.

The construction of government-nongovernmental "partnerships" in developing countries was a norm that arose at the World Bank in the 1980s. It was first envisioned for ostensibly practical reasons: nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society actors were seen as important sources of expertise, skills, and resources for development. Over time, however, many bank staff came to privilege NGOs as partners in the political activity of strategy design and policymaking. Including NGOs in these processes was viewed as an implicit means to promote a more open and accountable model of governance.

World Bank staff began to promote these partnerships actively under President James Wolfensohn (1995-2005). In the late 1990s, the policy became an important component of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief initiative, through the requirement that civil society participate in the formulation of the Participatory Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), a condition for debt cancellation. In 1999, Wolfensohn announced that the bank would commit itself to a Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF) for development assistance based on "partnerships" with borrowing governments, their civil societies, and other international agencies. As described by some at the bank, the policy of involving civil society as a partner represented "a major shift" (World Bank 2001, 11).

This shift had potentially far-reaching consequences for domestic politics in developing countries. Were these participatory partnerships to work as intended, one would see governments consulting actively and regularly with NGOs about development problems and solutions, joint design and implementation of development policies and programs, and institutions and offices to standardize and formalize these joint activities. Consequently, societal actors would be brought into state decisions about resource distribution and policymaking in new ways, not only influencing policy agendas but altering or shifting established patterns of patronage and power. Is this happening today? After more than a decade, what have been the results of this effort by the World Bank to reshape state-society relations? What explains those results?

This article explores three cases in which the World Bank attempted to promote the new political norm of partnerships between governments and NGOs. The Gambia, Ecuador, and Guatemala share many similarities: all are small, institutionally weak, and relatively poor countries; each has experienced conflict and military regimes; and all three faced serious economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s. The World Bank began to push strongly for NGO participation in national poverty alleviation programs in the late 1980s and early 1990s in all three countries. In all three cases, these new partnerships failed in their first iteration. Those in power did not see the new ideas or practices as serving their interests; and in two cases, presidents actively intervened to ensure that the project resources remained firmly under central control. Yet the initial failures were followed by reflection (primarily by the NGOs and the bank) and renewed (but uneven) collaboration. By the 2000s, NGOs and state actors in the Gambia and Ecuador were actively engaged in relationships that ranged from organizing national consultations to implementing participatory projects and working as policy advisers in line ministries. Even in Guatemala, more state-NGO partnerships existed, although this change was less pronounced than in the other two.

What explains these patterns? The research for this study shows that NGOs learned relatively quickly that partnerships were in their interest. Participation and partnership offered new opportunities to increase their voice over-and access to-state and international resources. For most of the domestic NGOs studied, the partnership norm fit with their prior organizational beliefs about the value of their own social knowledge and expertise. Yet beyond the lesson that the World Bank's interest in partnerships offered new openings for them, NGOs had to undergo an often lengthy process of learning the rules of the game. Engaging with the World Bank and state agencies could be costly in terms of organizational time and effort. Moreover, NGO organizational investments were not guaranteed to lead to ongoing partnerships. "Strategic" learning involved not simply adopting a new idea but learning the practical steps that would be required to make partnerships work.