Informal Public Financial Management Institutions in a Decentralizing System-Lessons for the Implementation of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) in Sub-Sahara Africa.

Recent years have seen fundamental reorientations in international development cooperation. Two of the most far reaching ones have been the development of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP)and the increasing attention paid to decentralization. Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) have been introduced in the late 1990s as a pre-requisite for debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. They are intended to provide a national strategy for poverty reduction and sustainable development. This study looks at examples from sub-Sahran countries and how PRSP and decentralization interact with each other and what consequences of this interaction are by studying a third subject that has moved center-stage in international development cooperation over the last years: Public Financial Management (PFM). As evidence from sub-Saharan Africa shows, most PFM systems are characterized by lack of routine with administrative procedures which result in an ad hoc mode of action and uncertainty throughout the system. It refers to the fact that rules, procedures and institutions of the governance system are not entirely reliable and therefore do not provide longterm predictability. This on the other hand jeopardizes the implementation of national strategies for poverty reduction. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]