Poverty as Discourse

Galbraith (1990) not only sees poverty as an inhumanity in itself, but also as the source of oppression and conflict. A particularly graphic description of what is meant by poverty as lack of choice was given more than 30 years ago by Denis Goulet:

“The prevalent emotion of underdevelopment is a sense of personal and societal impotence in the face of disease and death, of confusion and ignorance as one gropes to understand change, of servility towards men whose decisions govern the course of events, of hopelessness before hunger and natural catastrophe. Chronic poverty is a cruel kind of hell, and one cannot understand how cruel that hell is merely by gazing upon poverty as an object”

(Goulet, 1971:23).

Jean-Philippe Thérien (1999:723) has pointed to the emergence over the last decade of two competing interpretations of international poverty that he has dubbed the

‘Bretton Woods paradigm’ and the ‘United Nations paradigm’. The former is associated with the discourse and practices of the international organisations initially conceived at Bretton Woods in 1944, namely the IMF, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and its successor, the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The latter corresponds to the discourse and practices of the UN and, in particular, those of its specialised agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), whose mandates are related to economic and social issues. Both paradigms explicitly seek to incorporate globalisation²⁶ into their thinking but differ significantly in their analysis of the impact that it had upon international inequality and development.

Perhaps, unsurprisingly, given their function as the main international agencies of liberal capitalism, the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) take a broadly optimistic view of the historical achievements of post-World War II (WWII) development:

“Over the last five decades, average per capita incomes in developing countries have more than doubled. The GDPs of some economies have more than quintupled…There has been a ‘green revolution’ in South Asia, an

‘economic miracle’ in East Asia, Latin America has largely overcome its debt crisis, and substantial gains in health and literacy have taken place in Africa”

(World Bank, 1995a:10).

26 We follow Held et al. (1999:7), who conceive of globalisation as “an essentially contingent historical process replete with contradictions” that is reconfiguring global power relations in ways that cannot be predicted and therefore need to be researched.

Future prospects are also deemed to be good, provided that the countries either adopt or maintain the ‘market-friendly’ package of policies recommended by the international financial institutions. Yet, as Thérien (1999) has noted, the BWIs did come to concede in the 1990s that ‘zones of extreme poverty’ still exist in the world economy and they have moved to make ‘poverty alleviation’ one of their current watchwords. Much of the World Bank’s (1995b, 2000) investment lending and the majority of its SAPs are now poverty focused. In a similar vein the IMF has made the financing of social safety nets a standard part of its macroeconomic programmes.

However, it is important to stress that the attention paid to poverty by the BWIs derives from a distinctly different worldview from that which drove the development debate in the 1970s and 1980s. For the BWIs poverty does not derive from asymmetrical inequalities in the structure of the global political economy, but is

“more the result of a temporary misadaptation of markets” (Thérien, 1999:732). The cause is perceived to be domestic, not external.

Thus poverty is treated by the World Bank as a consequence of “country-specific imbalances, policy errors, or political difficulties” (World Bank, 1995b:5). It must therefore be countered with selective measures addressed to particular states and situations, not with global reforms that might challenge the core principles of the international economic order. In sum, the vision is deliberatively restrictive and clearly political in its attempt to limit the range of possible, acceptable action. Hulme and Shepherd spell out the problems with this approach:

“A particular problem of contemporary poverty analysis, seeking to rapidly reduce poverty headcounts in an era of globalization driven by a neoliberal vision, is to see ‘the poor’ as those who are not effectively integrated into the market economy. This leads to a focus excessively on the role that market forces can play in poverty-reduction…there are two problems with [this approach]…First, such a focus will not meet the needs of all the different types of poor people. Second, such an approach encourages a focus on those poor whom the market can ‘liberate’ from poverty but neglects the needs of those who need different forms of support, policy changes, or broader changes within society that take time. The chronic poor – those who have experienced poverty for long periods, or perhaps, all their lives – are likely to be neglected in such an era given the multiple factors that constrain their prospects and the likelihood that market-based factors may contribute to their continued deprivation” (Hulme & Shepherd, 2003:404).

The World Bank’s website grandly proclaims that “Our dream is a world free of poverty”, pledging to commit the Bank’s “financial resources, highly trained staff and extensive knowledge base” to empowering the poor through such irreproachable strategies as the pursuit of ethnic and gender equality, environmental sustainability, accessible primary education and widespread community health care (World Bank, 2002:n.p.). The World Bank has been outstandingly successful in securing the adoption of this programme by other international organisations and by governments around the world. In the case of the United Kingdom, for example, successive development White Papers produced by DFID in 1997 and 2000 adopt and promote the World Bank agenda (DFID, 1997, 2000). Inclusive development, ‘pro-poor institutions’ and community initiatives are all invoked, differences respected and inequality deplored (World Bank, 2000:6). Behind these apparently progressive aims, however, there stands a commitment to a project that Karl Marx once described as

“the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market” (Marx, 1963:Chapter 32). The assault on poverty given pride of place in World Bank propaganda has been premised upon the adoption of policies that would extend the scope of the world market and the global reach of capitalism. In this context, the World Bank’s outwardly progressive anti-poverty strategy far from being a shift away from the neo-liberal revolution is, in reality, a means to completing it.

In comparison the UN paradigm remains closer to the radicalism that drove much thinking on international development questions in the 1970s. Yet it, too, has moved on from the framework of these discourses to embrace and promote as its central idea the notion of ‘global poverty’. While recognising the extent of the social and economic progress generated by post-war development policies, the UN position emphasises the unequal distribution of the fruits of development. As stated in the declaration adopted by the UN Summit for Social Development held in Copenhagen in 1995, “we are witnessing in countries throughout the world the expansion of prosperity for some, unfortunately accompanied by an expansion of unspeakable poverty for others” (UN, 1995:6). In other words globalisation is openly recognised as generating winners as well as losers. The liberalisation of trade and finance is understood to have reduced the capacities of national governments to shape the social order within the countries over which they preside, producing the ‘states of disarray’

that the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) has argued are the social effects of globalisation (UNRISD, 1995).

As can be seen, then, both the Bretton Woods and the UN paradigms offer strongly divergent accounts of the problem of international poverty and development. They are grounded in different institutional complexes and are sustained by different power blocs of markedly uneven weight within the current world order. The former is very much the orthodoxy of our time; the latter perhaps constitutes something of the critical opposition.