ABSTRACT
By early in the new millennium, Poverty Reduction seemed to present a comprehensive ‘inclusive’ neoliberal framework. This came replete with universal policy framings around economic Opportunity and financial Security, that were apparently linked back through a range of participatory devices to achieve Empowerment and mitigate social risks through service delivery. But governments remained the weak link in all this. Still missing were transparent budget and expenditure processes, budgetary and fiscal transfer devices to actually move the money down into places it might reinforce NIE’s incentives and give strength to sanctions when behaviour was not PRSP-compliant. As described in Chapter 1, actual practices here were plagued by all kinds of frailty and perversity: underpaid public services, unreliable resourcing, budget skimming, rent seeking and corruption. . . . Addressing this was to be achieved by no short route for it required, in the words of Pakistan’s 2003 PRSP, a ‘series of fundamental transformations’3 that amounted to a thoroughgoing reform of governance in its practiced form. This chapter will sketch a history of how the new politics of governing was finessed, and the technical instruments crafted by paralleling the 1997 to 2005 period covered in Chapter 3.
