The New Biopower: Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and the obfuscation of international collective responsibility

As successors to structural adjustment programmes, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) were introduced in 1999 as preconditions for World Bank and IMF concessional financing and for debt relief. PRSPs now serve as the basis of negotiations for a variety of development financing and have influenced the design of other aid instruments. This paper considers the impact of the PRSP framework on the constitution of global economic governance, in particular its effect in foreclosing possibilities for a radical revision of the rules and institutions of international economic law. The paper argues that the PRSP project not only reframes fundamental tenets of international co-operation and global communal responsibility but also establishes a new disciplinary framework for Third World state engagement with the global economy and the international law which sustains it. In this way the discourse and methods of resistance against the injustices of the international order have been appropriated to distil such dissent through qualified operationalising of contestable notions of 'participation', 'ownership', 'partnership' and 'poverty reduction', disabling the resurgence of any form of emancipatory politics in the international economic order, whether through a state-led NIEO-style revival or cosmopolitan social movement.