Poverty Reduction Strategies, Democratization and the Role of the World Bank

Through the principle of country ownership including broad-based participation, Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS) introduced by the World Bank and the IMF as a new condition for aid at the turn of the century have a non-negligible potential to promote democratization in developing countries. In this paper, we highlight how this potential could be made use of. At the same time, we develop a simple model which shows that, from a rational choice perspective, we cannot currently expect this potential to be explored, except for highly exceptional conditions of international public attention and transparency. Case study evidence for Malawi and Uganda is consistent with this hypothesis