The role of legislatures in poverty reduction : experience and future directions

Abstract

This paper forms part of the effort of the World Bank to deepen the understanding of the role of parliaments in the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) process with a view to building country ownership and more effective policies for the implementation of poverty reduction strategies. This paper traces the involvement of legislators in the PRS process and identifies key bottlenecks which make deeper engagement difficult. The paper concludes with suggestions for strengthening parliamentary oversight and civil society's interface with parliament on poverty reduction issues. Section I looks at the rationale for involving legislators in developing the RSP. Section II looks at the role that legislators have played thus far in PRS preparation and over-sight. Section III reviews constraints which legislators face in engaging in PRS issues. The last section draws conclusions and suggests ways in which parliamentary engagement might be deepened and how external partners can help them to sustain their involvement in PRS processes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.