Beyond Development: Local Histories of Global Poverty.

AuthorMcClure, Julia

Introduction

The Poverty Research Network and its project Beyond Development: Local Visions of Global Poverty was born out of the need to go beyond the mainstream development narrative, which has fetishized economic growth and the expansion of the capitalist world-system. The aim was to use history to problematise how poverty has been measured, represented, and explained by global elites. It used these local histories to question the belief systems and political and economic infrastructure of economic-growth-based solutions to poverty reduction and to explore alternative understandings of poverty and means of resistance. Analysis of poverty has often been historically truncated, leading to a shallow understanding of causation. Here the historical analysis is placed at the centre. By taking a locally rooted long-duree perspective, this project offers new insights into the causes of poverty and how different communities have understood it. This challenges one of the strands of development economics that sees poverty as caused by a failure to grow economically and solutions to poverty as based upon economic growth. History shows that rather than a solution to poverty, the pursuit of economic expansion has often been one of the causes of poverty. Communities around the world are increasingly turning to their local histories as a source of resistance to global processes of impoverishment.

In 2015, the international community met with the United Nations General Assembly and pledged to 'end poverty in all its forms everywhere' through a programme of so-called 'sustainable development'

(https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg1 accessed 01.05.2019). Every year, billions of dollars are spent on development in order to bring about the end of poverty. In 2017 the EU invested 75.7 billion euros in development to help end poverty (Latek, 2019). The US invested 20.7 billion dollars in humanitarianism, and a further 6.5 billion was given by private US citizens (Global Humanitarian Assistance, 2018). Despite this multi-billion dollar spending on development, it is thought that by 2030 half a billion people will live in extreme poverty.

(https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty_accessed 01.05.2019). International organisations such as the World Bank have promoted a good-news narrative that current economic-growth-based poverty reduction programmes are working (according to the World Bank, global poverty has decreased by 36% since 1990, as 1.1 billion people have 'escaped poverty'.

https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview accessed 05.05.2019), but this 'miracle' is more representative of a change in the way poverty is measured than a real reduction in poverty (Hickel, 2017). The World Bank now acknowledges that, by any measure, the rate of poverty reduction has slowed (https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/09/19/decline-of-global-extreme-poverty-continues-but-has-slowed-world-bank accessed 05.05.2019), and that climate change threatens to increase poverty in coming years (https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/09/19/decline-of-global-extreme-poverty-continues-but-has-slowed-world-bank accessed 05.05.2019). As Andy Sumners summarises, since the end of the Cold War the development industry has promoted a programme of 'catch-up capitalism' but has failed to end poverty despite economic growth (Sumners, 2016). Indeed, there are circumstances in which economic growth clearly increases poverty, when the possible gains of economic growth of off-set by the terms of corresponding trade deals, a phenomenon known as 'immiserizing growth' (Bhagwati, 1958, and Pyro, 2007).

It has become untenable to believe that economic growth can end poverty, as Jason Hickel has observed, 'to eradicate poverty at $5 a day, global GDP would have to increase to 175 times its present size' (Hickel, 2017, 57). As Hickel has explained, 'sustainable development' is a contradiction in terms as economic development can never be environmentally sustainable (Hickel, 2019). Rather than ending poverty, this economic growth accelerates the degradation of physical and social environments that cause poverty. History can help us understand the link between economic growth and the creation of poverty and the forms of resistance that can help us engineer new ways to end poverty that don't simply maintain the interests of the status quo.

International development is designed and financed by international institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, which are invested heavily in maintaining the status quo of the current economic system. The slogan of the World Bank is 'working for a world free of poverty,' but it seeks to achieve this through promoting a model of economic development based upon economic growth, which integrates the national economic framework of so-called 'developing countries' further into global financial systems. Developing countries have been encouraged to take loans and engage in structural adjustment programmes and quantitative easing, supposedly to stimulate economic growth, which will 'trickle-down' and help end poverty. One of the former heads of the IMF, Joseph Stiglitz, observed that many of these policies created structural dependencies that limited the capacities of 'developing' countries while serving the interests of 'developed countries'...

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