Despite the widely recognized need to foster pro-poor growth, the search for adequate policy mechanisms is ongoing. Economic gains at the aggregated country level often dominate assessments of development effectiveness, while distributional impact analyses at the disaggregated level identify persistent pockets of poverty and increasing inequality within countries. The reasons for this continuous challenge to devising more effective development strategies can be manifold: lack of contextual understanding, or prescription of one-size fits-all reform policies in many international development organizations, as well as the underestimation of political economy factors where powerful interests acquire development benefits at the expense
of already vulnerable groups. In response to these issues, development practitioners introduced instruments to tackle these pitfalls in their operational work two of which are Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) and a Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of the Political Economy of Reform. This paper aims to illustrate these instruments methodologically as well as applied in country cases. This should provide the basis for a discussion of the potential that these instruments can offer to support development operations to foster pro-poor growth. We will conclude our paper by outlining the remaining challenges.
