A new regulatory discipline : Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) in the framework of postcolonial international law and global governance

• Main Author: Tan, Chai-Ling Celine
• Published: University of Warwick 2007
• Subjects: 340; HG Finance
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.528161

This thesis is an examination of the Poverty Strategy Paper (PRSP) approach to regulating countries' access to external financing. It locates the PRSP project in the context of contemporary global governance and postcolonial international law and considers its impact on third world state engagement with the international economy and the regulatory webs and institutions, notably the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which underpin these relations. Approaching the subject from an inter- disciplinary perspective, straddling discourses of law, political economy and sociology, this research combines an empirical methodology for examining the linkages between the normative effect of the PRSP framework and the actors who advance these norms with a critical analysis of the power dynamics which underlie the relationships of the subjects and objects of the framework. The thesis demonstrates that far from its emancipatory language, the PRSP project, both in its operational and discursive manifestations, foreclose possibilities for the radical revision of the current asymmetrical rules and institutions of international economic law. Conversely, findings from this research suggest that the PRSP framework adversely reconfigures the form and substance of third world engagement with international law and the global economy. The PRSP project reframes fundamental tenets of international cooperation and global communal responsibility by problematising the state in the context of economic and social development; and constituting nation states as primary sites for the fulfilment of economic and social rights ascribed collectively. This restructuring takes place through a series of legal and institutional interventions of the PRSP framework, as well as through shifts in the regulatory mechanisms, notably the doctrine of conditionality, governing relationships between third world states and their external financiers. In this manner, the PRSP framework introduces a new regulatory discipline on third world states and represents a continuation, if not exacerbation, of the asymmetrical sovereignty characterising postcolonial international law and the imperial nature of the 'development' project sustaining the logic of these relationships, with significant impact on the potential for resistance and reform.