Third World Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 8, 2008, pp 1639–1652
Perspective
Beyond Impoverished Anti-poverty
Paradigms
JAMES H MITTELMAN
ABSTRACT More subtle than the manifestations of poverty are the paradig-
matic means of sustaining, deepening or lessening it. Indeed, dominant
knowledge structures are insinuated in policy making and conventional antipoverty measures, some of which reflect the poverty of the intellect. Ensconced
in distinctive contexts, poverty itself is shaped by the template of neoliberal
globalisation. This paradigm promises that economic gain will benefit all who
are faithful to its principles. It evokes a vision not only of economic well-being
but also of distributive justice, including poverty reduction. In its centrist and
reformist guises, the orthodox anti-poverty paradigm may be best understood as
a chain of relationships: neoliberal concepts, a preoccupation with methods for
measuring results, a loathness to tackle underlying factors that generate
widespread privation, gender ideology, and the delinking of economic reform
and social policy. On the rise, too, is growing resistance to this consensual
thinking, mainly from transnational civil society organisations and allied
intellectuals. Six priorities are suggested as the basis for forming multiple,
decentred paradigms to expunge poverty. The challenge is to produce
homegrown knowledge structures that open to learning from other experiences.
The day-to-day manifestations of abject poverty are patent. More subtle,
however, are the paradigmatic means of sustaining, deepening or lessening it.
Indeed, knowledge sets are insinuated in policy making and conventional
anti-poverty programmes, as illustrated in the following vignettes:
.
In 1996 I visited the Calabarzon region of the Philippines to learn about
‘social forestry’, a type of community-based development. When asked
about ongoing reforms that called for growing the economy before
attending to poverty alleviation, distribution and equity, civil society
activists and researchers there answered: ‘The root causes [of the
problem] are in social structures reinforced by the development paradigm.
The paradigm is the villain’.1
James H Mittelman is in the School of International Service, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave,
NW, Washington, DC 20016, USA. Email: [email protected].
ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/08/081639–14 Ó 2008 Third World Quarterly
DOI: 10.1080/01436590802528788
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JAMES H MITTELMAN
.
.
This interview about distributional justice in the face of poverty rekindled
memories of Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United
States (1962), a sobering treatise on the persistence of grinding poverty
amid plenty. Harrington’s book caught John F Kennedy’s attention and
became an inspiration for the ‘war on poverty’. Launched by the Lyndon B
Johnson administration, the US commitment to fight poverty in the
domestic arena was, however, soon scuttled in order to fight another kind of
war, the one in Vietnam. Without a sufficiently strong, bottom-up social
movement behind it, this anti-poverty programme could not be sustained.
Certainly, during rising American-led globalisation in the 1980s, Harrington
turned his thoughts to changing market and labour conditions: the new
poverty in the USA. But for a time, he and his associates, a kind of brain
trust, succeeded in injecting an anti-poverty paradigm into policy.
Against a far different historical backdrop, the connections between ideas
and power were evident in the eruption of political violence in Kenya in
December 2007 and 2008. In what had been regarded as a stable country
and an engine of regional economic growth, irregularities in elections
triggered mass killings. The groundswell of resentment centred not only
on a tussle between political rivals and among ethnic groups, but also on
endemic corruption, with fury directed at the ‘Big Men’, as they are called
in Kenya. Members of this cadre stepped into the shoes of the British
colonisers, who had sought to eliminate indigenous nations (‘tribes’) and
to lay the foundations for a new Kenyan collective identity. After political
independence, the leaders favoured by the British, the group surrounding
the country’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, exploited a fabricated
national identity, which glosses differences. But class antagonisms run
deep and are easily stirred up, as became especially apparent when the
country’s anti-graft chief, John Githongo, exposed high-level corruption
and then went into exile in 2005. Nonetheless, the World Bank has
steadfastly enforced the neoliberal paradigm: a package of ideas and
policies centerd on deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation, giving
primacy to involvement in the global economy at the risk of welfare losses
and distributional mal-effects. In Kenya the World Bank manages projects
of this sort that now amount to at least $1 billion (Wallis, Holman & Guha,
2008). Western governments have tolerated corrupt governance partly
because Kenya maintains military agreements with them and is a partner
in the ‘war on terror’. Meanwhile, along with growing population,
unemployment and land hunger, the poverty and despair of the people
have increased: from 48% percent living below the poverty line in 1990 to
55% currently subsisting on under $2 per day (Holman, 2008).
The foregoing stories graphically represent the links between knowledge
structures and policy, the globality of poverty and deprivation, and ways in
which poverty may be both a source and a result of political conflict. Mainly
driven by agents such as organic intellectuals of divergent persuasions and
international economic institutions, powerful paradigms propagate ideas
about poverty and provide ties to action for a clientele to embrace.
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If a paradigm in Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) sense is understood to mean a
common framework, a world-view that helps to define problems, a set of tools
and methods, and modes of resolving the questions deemed askable, then a
multilayered view of poverty is warranted. In this article I want to explore this
multifaceted approach for thinking about poverty reduction, the perceptions
that it shapes, and major anti-poverty programmes that are put in place.
Examining key ideas inscribed in policy throws light on factors that advance
or hinder solutions, and points towards altering steps that may be taken.
Diagnostics
Poverty is a matter not only of income, but also of security, disease,
unemployment, food and water. There are both objective and subjective
dimensions of poverty. At bottom, poverty is the want of well-being.
To comprehend the dynamics of poverty, one must disclose hidden sets of
vulnerabilities and their mechanisms. These are a combination of an
accumulation of old problems and new stresses, including soaring costs for
energy and food, demographic change (a bulge of youth in the developing
world and an ageing population in developed countries), global climate
change that most adversely affects small farmers in the poorest countries, and
concurrent pressure to green the economy.
Ensconced in distinctive contexts, poverty itself is shaped by the paradigm
of neoliberal globalisation, which promises that economic gain will benefit all
who are faithful to its principles. It bears repeating that this paradigm evokes
a vision of both economic well-being and distributive justice: a win-win
situation for lifting millions of people out of destitution, rather than a
winner-take-all dynamic. But its failings are evident not only in practice
(most spectacularly, shock therapy administered in the former Soviet
republics, advice rendered by international economic institutions in East
Asia during the 1997–98 meltdown there, and the Argentinian debacle at the
turn of the millennium), but also in a poverty of ideas.
Confusions
Analysts have devoted enormous energy and resources to measuring poverty.
After all, indicators of poverty trends can inform research and modifications
in policy. Yet descriptive statistics have their limitations. The never-ending
debates about benchmarks—purchasing power parity conversion factors,
appropriate adjustments to calculate international poverty lines across
currencies, the correspondence of these yardsticks to the real cost of meeting
basic human needs, and so on—conjure an apparent objectivism in thinking
about poverty. This discourse approaches poverty as if hard-edged scientism
can really address the chronic challenges, all the while neglecting its intersubjective dimensions (an issue to which I will return).
Closely related is the misconception that poverty is a matter of lagging
behind and then catching up. This standpoint may be likened to thinking
about runners on a track: the one at the back of the pack merely has to
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quicken the pace to come astride the leaders on the route to economic
growth. If it were only so! Poverty is not a linear phenomenon amenable to
economistic strategies geared to managing scarcity.
Wisely cautioning against single-factor explanations, Paul Collier (2007)
claims that a series of traps grabs hold of inhabitants of some developing
countries, most of them in Africa.2 In his book The Bottom Billion, Collier, a
former director of research at the World Bank, now a professor of economics
at Oxford University, argues that poverty itself is not a trap. According to
him, most of the world’s poor are able to escape extreme poverty, but nearly
one billion remain stuck at rock bottom. Hindering development are high
levels of conflict; bountiful natural resources, which can reduce a country’s
likelihood of exporting other goods and services; landlocked locations in
dangerous neighbourhoods; weak economic infrastructure; and bad governance in small countries. Collier then buys into the notion that the challenge is
to catch up. He thereby falls into the ‘gap trap’ as his premise in a how-to
volume.
His prescriptions for the bottom billion are a combination of instruments:
aid, heightened security, good laws and governance charters, and reform in
trade policy whereby developed countries open their markets and lift tariffs.
In effect, this advice is a repackaging of old policies, more of the conventional
paradigm and not a new direction.
There is also a problem of voice. Collier listens only to a small circle of
Anglo-American celebrity economists, the usual suspects such as David
Dollar, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. Stonily silenced in The Bottom
Billion are prominent intellectuals from developing countries—the likes of
Claude Ake, Samir Amin, Jomo KS, Amartya Sen and Muhammad Yunus—
who have contributed importantly to discussions about strategies for
alleviating poverty. However well-travelled he may be, Collier insists on a
perspective that is parochial. At the very least he should acknowledge
opposing views outside his frame. One is left to mull over why he fails
to engage critical reflections and major debates (eg Escobar, 1995;
Chossudovsky, 1997; Duffield, 2001, 2007, granted, the year when Collier’s
book appeared; cf Sachs, 2005).
My point is not to dwell on the work of one researcher, but to show ways
in which reformist neoliberals are revisiting centrist neoliberal ideas about
world market integration and the implications for poverty reduction. Now,
there is considerable to-ing and fro-ing over the successor to the Washington
Consensus (the uniform package for extending market reforms and limiting
the role of the state), partly because a post-9/11 globalising era presents new
power relations.
A candidate for an enhanced Washington Consensus is the Monterrey
Consensus, the outcome of a 2002 UN conference on financing for
development, mobilising domestic and international resources, and expanding trade as an engine for development. In these discourses the reformist lens
(as in Rodrik, 1997; and Stiglitz, 2002, 2006) recognises some of the
shortcomings of the neoliberal model and seeks to reset the nexus of
globalisation and development, including poverty dynamics. Latterly the
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post-Washington discourses, while not novel, feature empowerment,
participation, multi-stakeholder engagement, and sustainable development,
all the while actually targeting the poor as market citizens. The trouble with
these in-vogue idioms is that the modification in language about poverty
alleviation and the attendant bureaucratic mechanisms (offices in ministries,
targets, and the like) are not an elemental departure from the standard
neoliberal policy paradigm.
Consider Tanzania. With its Vision 2025 and Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) on poverty, the economy has grown at over 6% for the past
five years. But overseas aid flows profusely into Tanzania (at 42% of the 2007
national budget, more than anywhere else south of the Sahara), two-thirds of
households do not have piped water, 89% are without electricity, and
inequality, at 34.6 on the Gini index, puts it at 159 of 177 countries on this
metric (United Nations Development Programme, 2007/2008).The country
awaits significant poverty alleviation. Or, to take a different type of example:
Malaysia has all but eradicated absolute poverty, but social scientists there
are focused on the hike in relative poverty (Abdul Rahman Embong, 2002;
Ishak Shari, nd). According to the most recent figures, Malaysia’s Gini index
is 49.2, placing it in 63rd place among 177 countries in the world ranking
(UNDP, 2007/2008). In both cases the telling question is: whose priorities are
embodied in a poverty reduction programme? Also, to the extent that foreign
assistance is a component of this agenda and conditioned on good
governance, the crucial issue is: whose ideas about good governance? And
how are they implanted and cultivated?
Lending agencies not only set conditions and advise borrowers, but
produce information. The World Bank is the main source of statistics on
world poverty. It is also a repository of categories for representing poverty
and mathematical methods to gauge its levels.3 But is there a conflict of
interests in an international economic institution, headquartered in
Washington, DC, where the most powerful and richest member appoints
its chief officer and mandates the organisation to generate the numbers on
poverty? In the face of fierce criticism, does the Bank attempt to show that its
performance meets high standards and warrants more support (Wade, 2008:
385)? Surely the inter-relationship between the manufacturer of data and the
interests at play is worth scrutinising.
Mechanisms
I am not suggesting that the World Bank deliberately cooks the books. But
the Bank combines its roles as a major producer of paradigmatic thinking
about poverty, the main adducer of ‘facts’ in the poverty industry, and as a
lender that conditions loans on a specific set of criteria. In this respect it is
important to contemplate Robert Hunter Wade’s contention about the
Bank’s view of poverty and development:
[The World Bank] is exposed to arm twisting by the G7 member states and
international non-governmental organizations; it must secure their support and
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defend itself against criticism. It seeks to advance its market-opening agenda,
not mainly by arm-twisting but more by establishing a sense that the agenda is
correct, because confirmed by robust empirical evidence. If it seriously qualified
its argument that market liberalization is the driver of development it would
lose the support of the G7 states, Wall Street, and fractions of developing
country elites. (Wade, 2008: 405)
The point is that the Bank is at the centre of a complex that universalises a
paradigm for thinking about poverty. This paradigm has been sustained by
an inter-elite consensus on an international level. Accompanying this
consensus are secondary disagreements among elites, partly between the
global North and global South. Also, as mentioned, there are efforts to
refurbish consensual thinking. On the rise, too, is growing resistance to it,
mainly from transnational civil society organisations, such as the campaign
undertaken by a broad coalition to ‘Make Poverty History’. A galvanising
force in this contestation is the World Social Forum, which proposes
alternatives.
In the meantime the dominant paradigm for poverty alleviation renovates
an old-fashioned view ingrained in modernisation and conventional
economic theory: ‘we’ are partners in development. Oft-heard are expressions
of moral outrage about entrenched poverty and the ethical imperative that
‘we’ ought to help the desperately poor. The imperial ‘we’ is the Group of
Eight (G8), a club of rich countries. Overlooked in such pronouncements are
that the G8’s promises of aid, especially to Africa, remain largely unmet and
that member countries lack the political will to tackle global poverty.
Without a way to summon this will, pious proclamations about poverty
reduction merely express wishful thinking.
A centrepiece of the dominant paradigm is the United Nations Millennium
Declaration. After the leaders of 189 countries endorsed it in 2000,
international summits hammered out the MDGs, alluded to above. These
are incorporated in the World Bank’s war on poverty, glimmerings of which
had first appeared during the tenure of its president Robert McNamara
(1968–81), a former US secretary of defence and an architect of the Vietnam
War. Subsequently, in 1996, World Bank President James Wolfensohn called
for a ‘new paradigm’ for poverty reduction as part of a Comprehensive
Development Framework. Following the introduction of the Heavily
Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) in 1996 and the expansion of this
programme into the Enhanced HIPC Initiative, the Bank’s pledge to fight
poverty was enshrined in its Poverty Eradication Plan and folded into the
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers in 1999 (World Bank, as cited in
Blackmon, 2008: 189).
Unquestionably this initiative and the MDGs themselves include commendable objectives like halving acute poverty, defined in terms of the World
Bank’s $1 per day threshold, in the developing countries by 2015. The idea is
to reduce the proportion of people who go hungry, to treat diseases, address
child mortality, and improve access to education. To this end a plethora of
targets and measurable outcomes are incorporated. Meanwhile, the USA has
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paralleled this international process by establishing its own Millennium
Challenge Account.
Yet observers such as Ashwani Saith (2006) have faulted the MDGs as mere
lip service to worthy ends. These goals are seen as a means to use the antipoverty agenda as a policy instrument for dispensing a neoliberal market
prescription for restructuring societies and economies. Requisite conditionalities are a mechanism for accomplishing this convergence. Complementing
them are various actions like public–private partnerships, the UN system’s
concept of a Global Compact, and global financing arrangements.
Regarded by critics as ‘palliative economics’ and ‘welfare colonialism’,
anti-poverty programmes like the MDGs are preoccupied with measurable
progress towards achieving targets focused on symptoms and divert
attention from the basis of development itself (Reinert, 2007). From this
heterodox perspective it is held that, as a corrective to the nostrums of
neoliberal economics, the production system must be revved up, and first and
foremost oriented to the domestic market; supplementally to the regional
market.
So, too, the emphasis on a family of statistics and quantitative indicators,
descended from the neoliberal tree, utilises intellectual vitality to grow
bureaucratic and technocratic forests. They become buttresses for a poverty
industry served by officials and allied intellectuals, many of them hired
consultants. This business stands to enervate critical reflection and creative
thinking. Other intellectuals and activists emphasise not only both absolute
and relative poverty, but also a rights-based approach to freedom from
extreme poverty as well as ways in which local and global forces coalesce, as
evident in analyses that focus on the feminisation of poverty.
Although poverty is an age-old phenomenon, today there are policies that
entrench its gendered dimensions. Indeed, it is widely reported that women
are the majority of the world’s poor because of unequal access to education
and other opportunities, discriminatory laws regarding inheritance and land,
and unequal household work, which remains outside the formal labour
market (Eisler, 2007: 124, 224; United Nations Development Fund for
Women, 2007).
With neoliberal restructuring, a decline in social services puts more
pressure on the family and affects rates of child poverty and intergenerational
poverty. It is primarily women who take on responsibilities jettisoned by the
state, in its response to globalisation, and who still carry out traditionally
defined work at home. Although some women have new sources of income
because globalising processes incorporate them in the formal labour force,
old forms of household work become more arduous; the reorganisation of
production has a disruptive and uneven impact on ways of life. The gendered
division of labour continues to place most women in subordinate positions.
After all, gender is fundamentally a relationship of power. Gender ideologies
consist of embedded beliefs that order power relations between men and
women. As with other ideologies, structures of domination are preserved
in an often unconscious manner through ‘commonsense’ assumptions
(Mittelman & Tambe, 2000: 74–89).
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Gender ideology merges with other ideological currents that sustain
poverty. One of them, several centuries in the making, is fatalism. This
attitude is not solely a facet of religious faith about mandated destiny. It is
also linked to disillusionment, economic frustration and a failure to defeat
poverty. It is a way of coping with bleak life chances. It is fear that fosters a
lack of purposive will in curbing poverty.
On the other hand, it may be argued, there is no dearth of wilful policy
recommendations for mitigating poverty. But again, it must be asked: who
benefits from poverty alleviation programmes? If foreign assistance is
actually forthcoming, does it still foster aid dependence? And are the safety
nets for the poorest of the poor more than public relations devices? Inasmuch
as the dominant paradigm delinks economic reform and social policy, should
the antidote be the reverse: to relink economic reform and social policy? To
re-embed the economy in politics and society?
Shifting towards alter-paradigms
As Collier (2007), other researchers (eg Mittelman, 2006), international
agencies such as the World Bank and UNDP and various datasets (see Center
for International Earth Science, nd) have amply documented, the incidence
of poverty is shifting among and within regions, notably in Asia, especially
with rapid economic growth in China and India, the two most populous
countries. According to the most recent data available, 75% of the drop in
poverty in the developing world for the past 20 years has occurred in China
alone (World Bank, 2008a). Systematic evidence indicates that market-driven
growth lifts large numbers of the rural poor out of poverty, amplifies
migration to the cities, and contributes to rising inequality in rural–urban
poverty (Wan, 2008).
Notwithstanding intra- and interregional variation, the underlying
conditions for poverty production at a world level remain in place. Millions
of people continue to be marginalised: pushed to the outer edges, away from
both core power and economic dynamism. The returns from their labour
barely cover its cost.
Again, this is not to undervalue exceptional cases of fleeing poverty. For
example, Finland was dominated by powerful neighbours, Sweden and
Imperial Russia, for several centuries. It first attained political independence
when Czarist suzerainty ended in 1917. Subsequently this country endured a
violent civil war between Bolsheviks (the Red Guards) and its right-wing
government (the White Guards), the Winter War (against the USSR in 1939–
40), and the Continuation War (also versus the USSR from 1941 to 1944).
After World War II poverty-stricken Finland was sparsely populated, mostly
by rural dwellers; lacked a rich bounty of natural resources; faced war
reparations (fully paid in 1952); and found itself in a precarious location
during the Cold War. In this milieu Finns remedied poverty by building a
strong state; establishing enough trust to strike historical compromises among
contending parties and interests; investing in human resources; providing
generous safety nets; and developing communication technology.
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Finland and the handful of other countries that have wiped out poverty
offer historical lessons that warrant examination, even though these
experiences can not be simply generalised to different contexts, especially
under conditions of global stress that increase vulnerability.
Of course, there is no speedy fix for overcoming poverty. For the poorest
countries surmounting poverty and underdevelopment are intertwined:
indeed, they are inseparable. Addressing the causes of poverty, not merely
its manifestations, in these zones is a matter of escaping underdevelopment.
A number of levers must be pulled in order to lift out of these conditions.
Speaking of Africa, the late Claude Ake, a leading Nigerian intellectual,
famously observed that the problem with development is that it has not been
tried (Ake, 1996: 1, 159).
To tamp down poverty and jumpstart development, what is to be done? Six
priorities are crucial. What follows is a basis, not an exhaustive list or a
formula, for shifting the anti-poverty paradigm, certainly in ways that need
to be elaborated and contextualised.
Resuscitate the national project
The early colonisers found nations and sought to change indigenous
people’s minds about community. The occupiers transformed institutions
and extracted surplus. They used physical and psychological coercion,
giving birth to the national project, although local groups shaped it as
well through a combination of accommodation and resistance. Institutionalised as the national state, the postcolonial form was based on the
supposition that leaders could really make meaningful decisions in the
international arena, a belief in developmentalism (the ideology of
modernisation), and cultural control manifest as national languages,
national holidays, national educational systems and museums, and
nation-building slogans and songs. But, as noted, the ‘Big Men’ betrayed
the ideals of political independence, using public office as a means to
accumulate wealth. From the 1970s on the leaders bought into an
international consensus, the neoliberal framework of ideas and polices;
they became managers of global flows, not autonomous agents (Cox, 1996;
Mittelman, 2000; McMichael, 2004). State structures, however, are not a
whole cloth; they are fragmented.
For some state authorities and civil society activists the response to the
dominant consensus is to counter the market-led model, which gives priority
to economic growth as the means to ameliorate poverty. The solvent is to
summon the political will to capture control in key spheres and expand policy
space for both spurring growth and lowering the several dimensions of
inequality. The latter involves concerting a bottom-up process so as to
reclaim politics, broadening access to opportunities, serving the needs of the
disadvantaged, and re-regulating spheres of the economy. At this stage of
history it is first a matter of achieving national control, but of a type that
opens to regionalism, as discussed below.4
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Desecuritise poverty5
In the dominant paradigm it is thought that combating poverty presupposes
and contributes to peace. If funds are withdrawn from lessening depravation
and used to fight armed conflicts at home or beyond national borders,
discontent mounts. The threat of instability looms. Post-9/11 these
conditions can become a seedbed for terrorism. This narrative is then used
to justify the militarisation of development aid and humanitarian interventions wherein any distinction between the military and more traditional
aspects of foreign policy, including diplomacy, is blurred. In some cases
counter-insurgency and poverty reduction programmes are interlinked. They
are part of the scaffolding of military–strategic security. They are absorbed in
nation-building and state-building initiatives. But to gain a larger measure of
autonomy and increase policy space for an emancipatory national project,
the corrective is to desecuritise poverty reduction in the sense of separating it
from governmental and intergovernmental means of violence, some of them
bound up with regional organisations.
Thrust out regionally
With the emergence of macro-regions (the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, the European Union, and the North American Free Trade
Agreement), small economies cannot compete on their own at a world level.6
And there is no going back to pre-globalisation conditions that antedate the
formation of larger units in the global political economy. The objective is not
to revitalise erstwhile forms of regionalism from a bygone era: co-prosperity
spheres, customs unions, and spiralling alliance systems such as the treaty
organisations for military security that typified the pre-World War II and
cold war periods.
In the 21st century, what kind of regional configuration is in order?
Today’s dominant model is neoliberal regionalism. It entails an extroverted
orientation and has meant the diminution of states’ and local social forces’
ability to control aspects of external affairs, such as trade and monetary
relations. In contrast, the development integration model is an alternative to
a one-sided emphasis on efficiency maximisation in the context of a low level
of productive capacity.7 Not only does this approach assign priority to the
co-ordination of production and the improvement of infrastructure, but it
also calls for a higher degree of state intervention than does the market
model, as well as redistributive measures such as transfer taxes or
compensatory schemes administered by regional funds and specialised banks.
Trade integration is to follow attempts to promote concerted regional
industrial development. This counterweight to the neoliberal framework
seeks to redress external dependence, especially through the regulation of
foreign investment. Even with new sources of aid, loans, and trade from
transitional economies, the rudimentary emphasis in development integration
is on intra-regional rather than extra-regional flows. This entails safeguarding
against new vulnerabilities without pursuing an autocentric route that closes
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the door to outside flows. That said, the emergence of China and India, the
increase in sovereign (state-managed) wealth funds from several countries,
the availability of resources from oil-exporting countries such as Venezuela,
and the consequent lessening of reliance on the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund (along with their advice on poverty reduction)
can afford more policy space for experimentation.
Ease external constraints
Notwithstanding persistent structures, such as unfair trade practices, that
impede the above steps, the goal is to allow people the freedom to take the
initiative in a trial-and-error manner and become masters of their fate. The
objective is to strive for autonomy within globalisation. Self-determination
should be a guiding principle. In this regard responsible intellectuals can play
a critical role in identifying the barriers and producing ideas for dismantling
them. Here it would be apposite to evaluate systematically the performance
of global commissions on economic growth, poverty reduction and
development. Taking aim at the World Bank Growth Commission (2008b),
chaired by Nobel laureate Michael Spence, William Easterly (2008)
emphatically maintains that its failure to produce vital insights signals ‘the
final collapse of the ‘‘development expert’’ paradigm that has governed the
west’s approach to poor countries since the second world war’. However,
Easterly, a former World Bank economist, is too quick to sound the death
knell of the governing paradigm, which the developmental poverty industry
ardently embraces. Even so, there is a deeper issue that may foster Easterly’s
disenchantment with the work of a global commission: it is time to
decommission development and poverty reduction. The impetus should be
found elsewhere.
Spark creativity
The challenge is resourcefulness, not primarily resources; inventiveness, not
inventions. These impulses are vital to enlarging policy space for homegrown
development, informed by paradigmatic shifts. First comes the regeneration
of indigenous epistemologies. In a globalising world this process also involves
moving up the value-added ladder to technological innovation and advances
in science, subject to economies of scale and natural resource endowments.
Emphasise synergies
The next priority is to synchronise the initiatives in a multi-pronged strategy.
For example, if there is to be education in scientific and technological fields,
who will gain in the context of limited budgets? There can be no doubt that
educating young girls from poverty-ridden backgrounds achieves returns in
areas like income, health, infant mortality, and HIV/AIDS. One must be
mindful, too, that technological development is a process, not merely the
acquisition of a commodity. If technology is to take root, it must be
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integrated in, or emerge from, an existing society (Mittelman & Pasha, 1997:
61). At issue is not only harmonising elements of a strategy, but sequencing
them so as to allow for gradual and selective redialing into globalisation with
increased local control. But in varying contexts, social forces on the ground
will resist this modernist urge for coherence insofar as synergies emanate
from the paradigm maintained by ‘Big Men’ at home and serve the interests
of globalising elites.
In sum
My analysis suggests that the orthodox anti-poverty paradigm may be best
understood as a chain of relationships: neoliberal concepts, a preoccupation
with methods of measuring results designed by the big players with their own
vested interests in the findings, a loathness to tackle underlying factors that
produce this widespread privation, gender ideology, and the delinking of
economic reform and social policy. In its centrist and reformist guises alike,
this paradigm contributes to the subordination of large sectors of
populations in many countries.
Rather than providing a manual, a blueprint or a universalising paradigm
for eradicating poverty, the task to is tilt against convention by supporting a
plurality of paradigms for extinguishing poverty. In other words, decentred
approaches to this indignity are warranted. The goal is to establish
homemade knowledge structures and strategic guideposts that involve
learning from different experiences, and to etch out the trade-offs among
alternative policies.
Notes
This article is based on my presentation entitled ‘Rethinking poverty paradigms’ at the opening plenary of
the ‘International Symposium on Poverty’, organised by the Deniz Ferneri Poverty Research Center in
Istanbul, 1–3 February 2008. Thanks for comments and suggestions from the participants at that event,
Linda Yarr, the anonymous referees for this journal, and its editor. The section on ‘Reviving the National
Project’ is drawn from my address at a public research forum, ‘Whatever Happened to the National
Project in Africa? A Retrospective and Prospective View’, in Uppsala, sponsored by the Nordic Africa
Institute and co-hosted by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 13 March 2008. Stellar research assistance
by Carl Anders Härdig is gratefully acknowledged.
1 RA del Castillo, Professor of Forest Resources and Director, Agroforestry Programme, University of
the Philippines, Los Banos, Laguna and LL Rebugio, Professor and Dean, College of Forestry,
University of the Philippines, Los Banos, Laguna, interviewed by the author 11 March 1996 and quoted
in Mittelman (2000: 187).
2 Some passages that follow on Collier’s book are taken from Mittelman (2007).
3 Globalisation researchers (Beck, 2006: 24–33; Scholte, 2005: 76) rightly warn about the pitfalls of
‘methodological nationalism’: a territorially oriented perspective predicated on state-constituted and
state-patrolled borders. These scholars point out that representations in censuses and other government
and international-agency statistics tell nationalist stories about the people behind them.
4 Taking into account the cautionary note (note 2 above) about methodology and identity politics itself, it
is nonetheless imperative to build strong national state structures for developmental purposes, just as
did the USA, European countries and Japan during their mercantilist phases.
5 My discussion of poverty reduction as a security issue draws on Duffield (2007).
6 Regionalism proceeds through various levels: macro-regionalism sponsored by states and economic
forces seeking to expand open markets and heighten competitiveness; subregional transborder
arrangements, including Asia’s ‘growth triangles’ and ‘growth polygons’; and micro-regional projects
such as economic processing zones. Accompanying the spread of an outward-looking regionalism is the
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proliferation of bilateral free-trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties, resulting in a
patchwork of global governance arrangements rather than a coherent multilateral framework.
7 This conceptualisation of development integration is adapted from Mittelman (2000: 116–117).
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