Are donors missing opportunities to engage the support of developing country elites for pro-poor policy? Is it correct to believe that elites are always hostile to efforts to tackle poverty?
This paper from the Institute of Development Studies considers how donors and international organisations can encourage support for anti-poverty measures among developing country elites. Aid agency staff tend to find elites unsupportive of or hostile to anti-poverty policies, or else find that pro-poor attitudes are not matched by actual commitment. Reactions to this hostility or weak commitment tend to be either diplomatic acceptance, or an increasingly common radical stance, in which the views of the poor alone are accepted as valid or important. But key political and economic decision-makers may be more supportive if they are constructively and sympathetically involved in the design of anti-poverty policies, rather than being excluded from such processes.
There are four reasons to believe there is potential for engaging elite support for pro-poor reform:
- Currently, dominant conceptions of poverty are neutral and economistic, and fail to give elites reasons to feel concerned about poverty or engage their sympathy for poor people
- ‘Poverty’ is multi-dimensional and can mean different things in different contexts, so that some notions of poverty resonate in some environments more than others
- Elites may perceive pro-poor reform to be in their own interests: The persistence of extreme widespread poverty may threaten their well-being, because of fears of crime, social disorder or potential health threats
- There is scope to present poverty reduction in more positive ways: Developing country elites still believe strongly in ‘development’ as a priority national goal. They perceive ‘development’ as an improvement in the quality of human resources. This opens a range of persuasive arguments about the need to tackle poverty as the basis for national development.
There is no simple formula for designing arguments that will trigger pro-poor responses everywhere. Nor would it be productive for donors to attempt to change elites’ thinking about poverty. Instead, donors could engage elites in discussions about poverty in ways that encourage them to think of the scope for joint gains from poverty reduction. The types of arguments most likely to prove persuasive with developing country elites include:
- Specific arguments justifying particular policies that benefit the poor because they also improve the human resource basis for development
- Implicit or explicit appeals to rivalries with similar or neighbouring countries which have performed well on poverty reduction
- Arguments emphasising national altruism – doing what is right for the people of one’s own country
- And, very importantly, plausible accounts of success with poverty reduction: Elites need to believe not only that there is a problem, but that there are solutions, and that governments or other actors are capable of implementing these.
Although engaging elite support for pro-poor reform does not require that they must be ‘pro-poor’, the most persuasive and successful arguments will appeal to both the compassionate and the instrumental reasons for tackling poverty as a priority.
