Introduction
Hossain and Moore’s (2001) study of attitudes to poverty among ’elites’ in developing countries concludes that they are in general less likely to be concerned with reducing poverty than those in developed countries and, by extension, those in charge of
bilateral aid programmes. The same study identifies as least likely to be sympathetic to reducing poverty those elites whose power is locally-based, particularly in agrarian relationships. The perception that poverty reduction is more likely to be promoted by
central rather than local elites underlies Crook and Sverrisson’s (2001) comparative study of poverty-reduction effects of decentralization. They conclude: 'the most successful cases were the ones where central government not only had an ideological
commitment to pro-poor policies, but was prepared to engage actively with local politics...to challenge local elite resistance if necessary and to ensure full implementation'. (Crook and Sverrisson, 2001:48). This emphasis on local political engagement by central government is in contrast with the more ’technocratic’ character of poverty reduction strategies which typically focus on managing resource flows from international funding agencies to local projects within internationallyagreed sectoral expenditure programmes (Craig and Porter, 2002). It also raises questions about whether the current emphasis on decentralization of government will assist or retard efforts to reduce poverty.
Decentralization is commonly regarded as a central component of ’good governance’ requirements of internationally sponsored poverty reduction strategies. Decentralization of resource management associated with democratic representation is
expected to improve ’responsiveness’ of government to the needs of the poor by allowing the poor more direct participation in decision processes and making local government officers more accountable for their decisions. This expectation remains the prevailing orthodoxy, despite evidence that ’local elites’ who invariably run decentralized government are unlikely to be more ’pro-poor’ than those who run central government (Johnson, 2001; Crook and Sverrisson, 2001).
This raises questions of how poverty is conceptualised by policy-makers and policy implementors, and whether there are opportunities for making poverty reduction strategies more effective through a ’re-identification’ of the nature and causes of
poverty that shifts the discourse on poverty in a 'pro-poor' direction. One obvious means through which such a re-identification of poverty may be achieved is through research. The case of Uganda is particularly interesting in this regard as the development of the government’s poverty reduction strategy has attributed a prominent role to evidence about poverty gathered from a variety of research activities, of which the two most important are the Uganda National Household Surveys (UNHS) and the Ugandan Participatory Poverty Assessment Programme (UPPAP). This paper reviews the ways the different research approaches have
informed the government’s poverty reduction strategy, and considers how research on poverty can be better designed to promote the cause of the poor. It argues that a belief in the efficacy of decentralization as a means to attack poverty derives from the same
assumptions about the nature of poverty that underlie current practice of participatory poverty assessments. It further argues that weaknesses in these assumptions translate into a lack of effectiveness of decentralization as a poverty-reduction strategy and also an inability of participatory poverty assessments to provide insights needed to challenge prevailing poverty discourse and identify alternative forms of pro-poor intervention.
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