I POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER 1364

# Summary findings

The sustained application of adjustment policies is explicable in terms of two variables - domestic ownership and capacity. These findings carry important implications for the future policies of African governments and their external partners.

There is an urgent need for the African governments to go beyond their limited and small groups of technocratic advisers and civil servants to consult, educate, and inform the representatives of the civil society and opinion-makers in the design and implementation of adjustment policies and institutional restructuring. A strong, committed, and visionary leadership that places these policy reforms in the contexr of the country's longterm development can bond and cement diverse and divergent viewpoints and nurture a shared vision for the future.

For the international financial institutions and external donors who are supporting African governments, the narrow, short-term, and conditionality-driven enforcement and compliance of agreements needs to be replaced by a medium- to lbng-term framework of macro, sectoral policy, and investrnent and institutional - changes developed and owned by govemment keeping short-term capacity as given constraints, but taking measures to develop rhis capacity within the long-term framework. This framework can then be translated into rime-bound, specific action programs on various agreedon changes between the donors and the African govemrnments.

Both the African governments and their external partners have to rethink the measures that will build, save, use, and enhance the capacity of African governments, private sectors, nongovernmental organizations, professional groups, universities, and research institutes. The adversarial relationship between the government and the private sector will have to be transformed into a symbiotic and constructive partnership aimed at achieving the long-term developmental goals. The effeciveness of the present practices of delivering the technical assistance by external donors has been sufficiently questioned, and a new way of delivering this assistance employing capacity building and utilization as the overreaching oblective needs to be developed. The transferability of institutions or policies from one setting to another has always proved difficult, but adapting successful practices that have worked elsewhere should be encouraged.

- - This paper a product of the Office of the Chief Economisr, Africa Regional Office is based on a recent study on adjustment in Africa. Copies of this paper are available free fromthe World Bank, 1818 H StreetNW, Washington, DC 20433. Please contact Joy Schwartz, room _J5-255,_ extension 32250 (44 pages)- October 1994.

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