This issue of IPC’s journal, Poverty in Focus, highlights the PSIA and PIA concepts and the experience so far of using these analytical tools for enhancing the effectiveness of poverty reducing policies, programmes and projects.
Available online at:
http://www.undp-povertycentre.org/pub/IPCPovertyInFocus14.pdf
Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) and Poverty Impact Assessment (PIA) are recently developed tools for analysing the distributional impacts of policies, programmes and projects on the wellbeing of the population, with particular focus on the poor and vulnerable. Both approaches provide a comprehensive framework for analysis while drawing on a wide range of well established approaches and tools covering economic, social, political and institutional issues. The International Poverty Centre (IPC) is administering a joint UNDP-World Bank Project on PSIA. The overall objective is to promote capacities in developing countries for analytical work on the impact of national policies and use these results to influence poverty reduction strategies. This involves adjusting policy design in light of the impact of policies on poor women and men, and providing evidence to inform national policy dialogue.
Featured articles:
Elke Kasmann, Solveig Bühl and Renate Kirsch introduce the PSIA and PIA concepts and their respective components and the transmission channel analysis.
Renate Kirsch adopts a social lens to policy analysis, focusing on how the structure of societies and institutional mechanisms influence the reform process.
E. Gacitua-Mario, C. Gros and R. Kirsch underscore the key role of stakeholder power and policy dialogue emerging from a set of agricultural reform case studies.
Nils Junge stresses the importance of a process approach to PSIA, involving adversarial groups in joint studies and negotiations on restructuring mines without social conflict.
Sabine Beddies and Jeremy Holland choose the ‘political economy of reform’ angle to explain how political actors, institutions and economic processes influence each other.
Sabine Beddies et al. illustrate the use of power mapping as a PSIA tool to predict stakeholder support, opposition and influence on the implementation of water reform in Yemen.
Elke Kasmann discusses the lessons of the German aid agency GTZ in applying PSIA from a governance perspective, promoting stakeholder participation in policy making.
Alwin Nijholt reports on three PSIAs in Malawi that all led to more pro-poor policy designs and led the Government to institutionalise PSIA as a basis for policy making.
Kate Bird summarises a DFID review of staff experience in using PSIA for evidence-based and participatory pro-poor policy making.
Elizabeth Stuart recaps a critical NGO review of PSIA practices and finds that the process is completed too late to feed into the design of reform policies.
Ibrahima Dia and Kerstin Meyer give an account of the experience of Senegal’s first PIA that proved a suitable basis for discussing key issues and assessing poverty impacts of a major industrialisation project.
Sheri Willoughby describes how PIA was used to study the impacts of four businesses geared towards the ‘base of the pyramid’ markets for the unmet needs of poor people.
This collection of articles is meant to contribute to a better understanding of the emerging analytical and process management tools of PSIA and PIA, and thus contributing to more effective policy design and implementation for poverty reduction results.
