Communication à un colloque
Résumé : Since the beginning of development cooperation with low-income countries, bottom-up approaches have been promoted in order to increase the effectiveness of aid. But they have been generally limited to simple consultation with beneficiaries and main stakeholders, without any real impact over decision-making and policy implementation. Since the 1990s, several reforms have been engaged to enhance national ownership, good governance and stakeholders’ empowerment. But these concepts seem overused. Indeed, these “participatory” and “empowering” approaches have hardly been accompanied by a real change in behaviour: donors and policy-makers generally go on working according to linear top-down logics, using logical frameworks and looking for short terms results and their attribution. Then, an implementation gap often persists between (inter)national strategies and reality on the ground. In this presentation, we define a more ambitious bottom-up approach, one where policy planning is based on realistic, systemic, inclusive and self-learning mechanisms and which includes paradigm shift and behaviour change. To be effective, the policy process should be organised through learning dynamics: for every phase of the process, operational stakeholders should be involved, their need and particular context taken into account, their capacities strengthened, their experiences and local evidence used as inputs for planning new policies and programmes. Stakeholders at all levels should accept the complexity of development, the fact that a strategy can take many paths and the possibility of failure. Results should also be expected on a longer term. This is an introduction to the session. Based on field experiences and extensive literature review, we present and discuss the main determinants and constraints of a successful bottom-up approach to improve policy-making process.