ABSTRACT
Mainstream development economics has typically concentrated on the contents of public policy, such as GNP per capita and investment rates, to the virtual exclusion of the processes that shape those contents and the people who are affected by public policies. This preoccupation with content has in turn translated into an inordinate focus on hard indicators of development, such as Gross Domestic Product and exchange rates, at the expense of soft indicators like citizens satisfaction with the contents and the process, a satisfaction which ideally should be part of the overall measure of the material and non-material progress of a nation.
After more than 50 years of hard-indicator development economics, during which social disaffection with public policy appears to have risen alongside growing and widespread poverty, perhaps it is time to incorporate soft indicators into development discourse and thus offer society a more complete view of its development efforts a view that would not only enrich the policy process but help it to yield outcomes that at the very least reflect the aspirations and satisfactions of the citizenry. This dissertation represents a modest attempt to foster such a complementarity in the development process, using Ghanas Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (SAPRI) as a case study.
Held in Accra in 1997, SAPRI was an effort by civil society organizations to gain a greater role in the policy process, after nearly 20 years of structural adjustment, during which public policy was formulated by a technocratic few and at the end of which social conditions had deteriorated not improved. Advocates of this new participation, or citizen engagement in development at the national rather than local level, argued that a participatory approach to national policy making was the surest way to intercept flawed policies at the national level before they become programs and projects at the local level.
The success of such participation, as viewed by the participants, not organizers, was defined in terms of inclusiveness, voice, and impact. Questionnaires were sent to them and the data analyzed with non-parametric statistics. Among other things, participants perceptions of inclusiveness were found to be conditioned significantly by such factors as the sex of respondent, despite efforts by organizers to promote gender balance. Female respondents, for example, were less likely than male respondents to view SAPRI as adequately inclusive of women and especially childrens issues, despite claims of representativeness by organizers. Voice the ability of citizens to make policy demands unhindered was, as anticipated, associated more with the organizational arrangements of the process than any other postulated factors, such as analytical capacity of the participants organizations. Overall, respondents views of the impact of their participation in SAPRI on public policy were surprisingly found to reflect existing hard indicators of development. The view by majority of respondents, for example, that childrens issues received less attention at the forum was borne out by findings in the Ghana Core Welfare Indicators Questionnaire (2004) that the nutritional status of children under five years deteriorated severely between 1997 and 2003.
The findings are situated within the context of the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy, the localized version of the IMF-World Bank-inspired Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, which considers widespread civil society participation as one of its strongest features.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-08232005-131813 |
| Date | 01 September 2005 |
| Creators | Thompson, Isaac Nii Moi |
| Contributors | Paul Nelson, John Mendeloff, Mark Ginsburg, Siddharth Chandra |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08232005-131813/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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