Rights, claims and capture: Understanding the politics of pro-poor policy (original) (raw)

Beyond the Redistributive Paradigm: What Philosophers Can Learn From Poor-Led Politics (2016)

In "Ethical Issues in Poverty Alleviation," eds. H.P. Gaisbauer et al. http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319414287 Philosophical approaches to alleviating global poverty have overlooked the contributions and insights of poor-led social and political movements. This failure to engage with the strategies and perspectives of poor communities is bound up with global justice theorists’ neglect of issues of social and political power in their prescriptions for global poverty reduction. One cause of this neglect is the prominence of the “sufficiency” doctrine, which treats poverty as strictly a matter of material lack and unmet needs. This view gives rise to the belief that poverty can best be redressed through judicious redistributive measures to reduce absolute low-welfare. Yet these assumptions are increasingly at odds with the multidimensional and relational approach to poverty that has emerged in policy and development studies. This approach takes structural inequalities, social exclusion, and relations of subordination and disempowerment to be central to the experience of poverty. Two emerging ethical approaches to deprivation — one emphasizing social exclusion and disempowerment, and one focusing on humiliation and misrecognition — come much closer to grasping the relational aspects of poverty. By shifting to a relational understanding of poverty and paying closer attention to the aims and strategies of poor-led organizations and movements, global justice theorists can start to think more expansively about the goals — and agents — of global poverty reduction. I illustrate the significance of looking to the role of poor communities as agents of poverty reduction by discussing the Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), a global grassroots network of organizations dedicated to empowering communities of pavement and slum dwellers.

Inequality and the Politics of Redistribution

Several thousands of years ago, Aristotle famously argued that 'extremes of wealth and poverty are the main sources of evil' in the world. In our time, evil signifies short, miserable and undignified lives; xenophobia, urban crime and violence. Yet a common point with Aristotle's epoch is that all these phenomena disproportionately impact the poor rather than the rich. Seen from this perspective, it can be argued that to talk meaningfully about poverty inevitably also implies talking about wealth, insofar as it is the processes and institutions that connect people differently that make some poor and others rich. In other words, attacking poverty requires a focus on inequality. However, inequality has been treated marginally in international development policy. It is as if what matters in creating a more humane world is absolute poverty. In this view, if extreme poverty is falling, governments should not worry about what happens at the other end of the income distribution. This is particularly evident when one considers the Millennium Development Goals. Several factors have contributed to the unfortunate divorce of poverty and inequality. In the 1990s, the view gained ground among some economists that high growth rates were sufficient to alleviate poverty, especially if income distribution remained unchanged. Governments were advised that they need not follow equity-based growth strategies, as what mattered most was the income level of the poor, rather than equality, whose pursuit might affect efficiency and ultimately growth itself. The fixation with growth and absolute poverty coincided with the triumph of free-market ideas and the finance and technology-induced boom of the 1990s. Even low-income countries in Africa started to experience growth in the late 1990s after the regression of the previous decade. On the eve of the new millennium, there was thus a strong belief that the plight of the poor could be improved without questioning macroeconomic policy orthodoxy and income distribution. However, an increasing body of evidence is showing that highly unequal societies need higher levels of growth than relatively equal ones to overcome poverty, and that there is no trade-off between equity and growth. In particular, poverty is closely related to inequalities of class, ethnicity and gender, which are therefore dysfunctional for development. High levels of inequality make it harder for the poor to participate in the growth process; restrict the expansion of the domestic market; may raise crime levels or cause violent conflict; and may create institutions that lock the poor into poverty traps. This clearly implies that there is a real need for specific policies that promote greater equity in

The politics of protecting the poorest: Moving beyond the ‘anti-politics machine’?

Political Geography, 2009

Famously derided as the ultimate 'anti-politics machine', international development has increasingly sought to integrate a stronger political perspective within its ambit. This includes devising new forms of political analysis to inform development interventions and efforts to support forms of politics that are deemed to be 'pro-poor'. However, this engagement with pro-poor politics remains limited and the agenda of advanced liberalism that international development agencies remain embedded within tends to draw its understandings of politics from ideology rather than evidence. Case-study analysis of the politics associated with successful social protection interventions in eight countries suggests that the political modes preferred within advanced liberalism-including civil society representation, inclusive policy spaces, and securing ownership-have been much less important in securing poverty reduction than more deeply political institutions and processes, particularly efforts from within political society to re-embed capitalism and extend social contracts to previously marginal groups. Deeper forms of political, political economy and political geography analyses are required to capture the politics of reaching the poorest groups, which needs to be understood in terms of processes of capitalist and political development that have important spatial dimensions, and which can be conceptualised in terms of extending the 'social contract' between states and citizens.

The Political Economy of Poverty Alleviation

Poverty is not a new phenomena, however the increasing rates and visibility of poverty, not only in rural areas, but also in the heart of urban cities make it onto the emerging agenda of states, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations as well. Meanwhile, poverty-alleviation programs, conducted by different actors, become the new means of a -noble‖ end-eradicating poverty. They have grown and diversified to meet the needs of poor people. Therefore, this course has two goals: 1-to understand how the political and institutional context affect -fighting against poverty‖. 2-to examine the impacts of poverty-relief strategies on political participation of poor people, especially in terms of clientelism, citizenship and their social inclusion/exclusion into the society. We will precede in four steps: First, we are going to go over conceptualization of poverty, debates about the measurement of the concept, and problematizing poverty related to portrayal of development as -westernization‖. The history of political economy of neoliberal transition and its impacts on conceptualization of poverty is also provided to complement these debates. The second part will cover institutional context of -governing‖ poverty within the broader framework of how different political actors-such as states, NGOs, World Bank, etc.-take part in making/pushing policy reforms, allocating/implementing these projects targeting the poor in developing countries. We will also deal with more specific questions such as the relation between different political regimes and their impact on poverty alleviation and development. Are democracies better fighting at poverty? Do institutions, geography, history has a say in explaining variation in poverty around the developing world? In the third part, we will investigate politics of poverty alleviation in terms of clientelism and citizenship. The role of electoral incentives in promoting poverty alleviation projects and its consequences on the ways of poor people' participation into politics will be discussed. Finally, the last part will be devoted to review case studies, large-N studies and ethnographic accounts of poverty through the poor people' experiences. Empirical evidences will be drawn from recent experiments in the Global South--Latin America, Middle East, Africa and South Asia.

On the New Politics of Distribution

TSANTSA – Journal of the Swiss Anthropological Association

The Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern inaugurated its new lecture series Anthropology Talks in September 2015. The fi rst guest was James Ferguson, professor at the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. The lectures and workshops focused on the questions of poverty and (re)distribution that Ferguson, a scholar with a pronounced political commitment, deals with in his new book Give a Man a Fish (2015a). Ferguson's thinking involves, within a context of widespread unemployment, a creative tension between ethnographic curiosity and political concerns about poverty reduction. Through projects that «just give money to the poor» (2015a: 2), his work examines what such interventions do in people's everyday lives, and how they might direct us towards a new politics of distribution, or «proletarian politics today,» as the main lecture's title suggested (Ferguson 2015b).

Decentring Poverty, Reworking Government: Social Movements and States in the Government of Poverty

Journal of Development Studies, 2010

The papers in this series have been undertaken as part of the 'Government of Chronic Poverty' project within the 'Adverse Incorporation and Social Exclusion' theme within the Chronic Poverty Research Centre. Amongst other things, this theme is concerned with the politics of efforts to tackle structural forms of chronic poverty. 1 Although each of the papers in this series engages with a different country context and policy issue, they all frame contemporary efforts to reduce chronic poverty as essentially political efforts to (re)govern the relationships between the trustees of development and poor citizens caught within processes of adverse incorporation and social exclusion. From this perspective they ask whether contemporary development interventions and actors, within what critics have termed the era of 'inclusive liberalism', necessarily depoliticise the task of reducing structural forms of poverty, or whether they are capable of empowering chronically poor people as rightsbearing citizens. While each paper makes clear that the answers to this question are highly contextualised, the synthesis paper seeks to draw out the comparative and broader implications of these studies for efforts to understand and challenge chronic poverty.

Distribution and Development Ethics: A Tour

1986

From the starting point of rich outsiders telling LDCs to redistribute internally and of others including (usually the well-off in) LDCs telling the DC rich to redistribute internationally, the agenda of the paper is as follows. First, to consider the claim that many development studies have been normatively primitive and neglected rightful claims which run counter to their redistribution proposals. Part 2 looks at the range of conceptions of distributive justice in fact available. Second, the more specific proposal that concerns with equality are misguided, either as a path to other current goals like welfare or liberty, or as an independent value. Part 3 comments on a series of such arguments against egalitarianism. It proposes that New Right claims are heavily overstated, though individually some have a degree of force and some are complementary and hence cumulative. There are matters of appropriate degree beyond Singer's radical sacrifice as well as beyond Nozick's radical rejection. Third, we must look at two recurrent themes in the anti-egalitarian arguments: absolutized values and a radical individualism. Part 4 considers the style and context of anti-redistributivist thought, to help situate its claims that concerns with equality will be absolutized, and/or are overridden by the absolute or unconditionally prior claims of freedom. The themes of absolutization and individualism are examined further in Parts 5 and 6, which turn from the direct attacks on egalitarianism to consider the claims of alternative normative theories of distribution, based on past events, not present needs or potentials. Part 5 reviews Locke and Nozick's theories of just acquisition, which lead on to assessment of past acquisitions and past DC-LDC relations. This potentially embarrassing subject for property holders leads in turn to a Hayekian defence via radical ignorance: namely that only appropriate processes, present holdings and the dangers of intervention can be securely known, and seeking someone to blame for misfortune is likely to be merely a childish outcry. Blaming is another theme in theories preoccupied with preceding events: being to blame, or not being to blame. Part 5 looks at its roots in individualistic psychology. Part 6 first reviews claims of absolute individual desert and suggests that these fit only a Crusoe on his `desert island'. It then analyzes the `blaming the victim' variant of desert theory that is often found in development literature. Finally, it seeks a more adequate view of the situation, constraints and consequent scale and types of obligation of the individual within his/her society (e.g. the developmentalist dispensing advice and official funds, but perhaps not his or her own). Part 7 moves on to the claim that specifically international redistribution is beyond any moral obligation, because nations are self-enclosed ethical universes. It considers whether there are any duties, or rights, to act - or even speak - across national boundaries. And if the foreign rich claim the right to preach redistribution to the local rich, can they at the same time exempt themselves from the duty to make transfers to the local poor? It will be argued that national boundaries have significance as working rules but not as absolute moral divisions. Part 8 concludes with the issue of interpreting the many constraints that must be respected in any concern with appropriate redistribution: notably the assessment of their relative force and fixity. Which are feasible excuses? It does not concentrate on substantive issues of just what are the constraints, just what are and would be the effects of attempts at redistribution and whether they actually help the poor. That would require another essay.6 Instead it examines types of feasibility and judgement, and the possible roles for ethics in a world of constraints.