- Excellent technical capacity and strong relationships with local communities and local authorities in the PPA agencies, combined with an eagerness to engage at the national policy level and to commit resources for this purpose;

- A strong emphasis on ensuring Government ownership of the PPAs through the mechanism of the Poverty Working Group (PWG);

- Availability of high quality household survey data to corroborate and enhance analysis; and,

- Timing.

# **Policy and Institutional Context**

## **_National policy formulation_**

Poverty reduction and equitable growth are central and important goals of the Government of Vietnam. But the poverty that is often defined in planning and policy documents refers mostly to economic deprivation and limited access to social services. The phrase "poverty reduction" is often equated to Government's Hunger Eradication and Poverty Reduction (HEPR) Program, which is a framnework of targeted support to groups defined as vulnerable or poor by the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs (MoLISA). As such, poverty reduction is often seen more in terms of social safety nets rather than addressing constraints at the macro, structural and sectoral levels.

In theory, participation by poor households in the Government's planning process can take place through the role that the Party (Communist Party of Vietnam) and the People's Councils play as their representatives. In some localities with active and consultative leadership, this may work well. In many places - and this was very clear from the PPA research - people rarely felt _informed_ about the Government's plans, less still _consulteGd'_ during the formulation stage. Government recognizes the need for greater transparency in its operations and there have been steps forward in the last few years. The national budget was recently published in summary form, for the first time ever. A recent decree stipulates actions which local leadership must take in order to promote grassroots democracy. This insists that communes (the lowest level of the administration in Government) must discuss their plans, budgets and expenditure with households and gain the agreement of the people to these initiatives. There is strong evidence that this decree has not yet been widely introduced. If consultations are not routinely taking place at the commune level, then the possibility of communicating needs and priorities up through the levels of Government to the national policymaking fora is extremely limited. Civil society is underdeveloped and does not yet play an active role in policy formulation.

Ensuring that the poverty diagnostic work, which the planning work can draw upon and refer to, included consultations with poor households, is an important means of feeding their perspectives into the plans. In the context of the PPAs implemented in 1999 in Vietnam, a number of factors were influential in determining the extent of this happening.

First, the timing of the PPAs could hardly have been better from the point of view of influencing policy. The PPAs were implemented to feed into the new poverty assessment (Poverty Working Group, 2000), which was favorably timed to be preceding an important 2