Religions and international poverty alleviation: the pluses and minuses.
Author | Martin, J. Paul |
Position | Essay |
Increasingly within the international development community and among religious organizations, it is argued that religious agencies offer something unique to development programs, especially to those designed to alleviate poverty. Generally, this comparative advantage is seen as forms of social capital. In fact, virtually all the world's major religions have traditionally urged and even imposed on their members a moral commitment to help the poor. Institutionally, they have devoted substantial material and spiritual resources to this cause. This paper examines the nature of this ethical and institutional commitment and its potential to have an impact on world poverty. It finds that religious beliefs influence economic systems, and that poverty alleviation strategies of religious agencies generally work within the dominant theories of development. Further, it also finds a danger of discrimination on the part of religious agencies due to their definition of nonmembers and the ways in which religion sanctions socially-defined roles, notably those of women.
Measured in dollars, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provides the greatest support of any single agency to development programs in the world. (1) It is thus notable when Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. secretary of state, to whom USAID reported, noted in her recent book, The Mighty and the Almighty, that there was a lack of expertise on the part of the State Department with respect to religion. (2) Since, the Bush administration has moved more directly into the field of religion, most overtly by establishing the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) to facilitate the access of faith-based organizations to U.S. government funds, including those for development and poverty alleviation. (3) These and other public sector initiatives with respect to religion are based on a number of assumptions, notably that to exclude them from public monies would be discriminatory, and that faith-based organizations offer something advantageous. This essay focuses on the latter. Conceptually, this advantage includes the religious groups' deeper motivation, greater levels of personal and community commitment and trust, shared belief systems and worldviews, international support networks, and voluntary financial donations from their communities. An additional advantage is the possible long-term presence of fellow religionists on the ground, either as members of the target communities or as agents, such as missionaries committed to working in these communities on a long-term basis. The assumption is that the presence of these factors makes aid more effective.
Religious organizations concerned with poverty are extremely varied. Thus, the combination of each of the above elements of social capital will vary from group to group, even within a single tradition. Their effectiveness with respect to poverty alleviation also depends on other factors, such as their analysis of the causes of poverty and their choice of implementation strategies. Today, as religion features more prominently in national and international politics, politicians are being called upon to make policy and strategic decisions that imply judgments on the roles that religious organizations can and cannot play One purpose of this paper is to examine the premises and the perceived cause-effect relationships of the religious factors associated with faith-based development agencies with a view to providing insights for policymakers, nongovernmental organization (NGO) leaders, other development agencies and to the religious organizations themselves.
The new attention to the role and functions of religion in international affairs must be contextualized in terms of both economic globalization and geopolitics. (4) Religion and economics, for example, have long been closely related. (5) The phenomenon of globalization has deep and complex roots, with religious factors never far from the economic. Historically, this was true of the early expansion of Islam and that of Christianity into the New World and sub-Saharan Africa. The growth of these religions often coincided with economic expansion. History also shows that economic forces sometimes aggravated and at other times mitigated religious tensions. For example, economic forces, namely the realization that there were mutually beneficial economic alternatives, was one of the factors that brought an end to centuries of violent conflict between Christian Europe and Islamic powers in the Middle East. (6) On the other hand, a political or economic alignment between religious and economic or business interests does not necessarily imply that their respective motives and agenda overlap or support one another. For example, European missionaries in Africa, while profiting from the support of their own governments, often decried the social and economic impact resulting from the policies of their home governments. (7) Recognizing this complexity is important as causalities are diverse and multifaceted.
Religion and poverty alleviation is not just an incidental relationship or a need of the present time. As will be illustrated below, for Muslim, Christian and Hindu traditions, helping the poor is a goal that is deeply ingrained in their ethical systems, as it is also for other religions not considered in this paper. To address the religion-poverty relationship, this essay will first examine the place of poverty in beliefs and practices of three major world religious traditions--Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. It will then consider their individual strengths with respect to social capital and strategies they use to alleviate poverty. The essay will conclude with an assessment of the role of religion in poverty alleviation from the viewpoint of the policymaker, focusing on the impact of religious factors on the agent, rather than on the intended beneficiaries.
Finally, by way of caution, it should be pointed out that measuring poverty, let alone evaluating different strategies to alleviate poverty, is a multifaceted, much disputed and lively contemporary field. This debate is well illustrated in the 2007 volume edited by Sudhir Anand and Joseph Stiglitz, Measuring Global Poverty, in which my Columbia University colleagues, Sanjay Reddy and Thomas Pogge contribute a very relevant article entitled "How Not to Count the Poor." (8) Monitoring poverty alleviation is but one of the factors discussed in this paper that call for continuing study. Some of the others are identified in the final section on implications for policymakers.
RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS AND ALLEVIATING POVERTY
If helping the poor has long been a core commitment of the world's major religions, it is especially within the last thirty years that it has become a major focus of the international development community. (9) Starting with the fact that millions of people live in poverty and the world community's recent acceptance of the Millennium Development Goals, this essay attempts to identify the beneficial and non-beneficial roles and outcomes of religious factors in the alleviation of poverty and how policymakers should best factor them into development planning. Like other common social values, such as peace and brotherhood, all the major religions value acts that benefit the poor. Thus, the issue in question is not the goal of poverty alleviation, but how the various religions implement the ideal in practice. (10) In addition to individual giving, the current institutional strategies of faith-based organizations can be categorized into three basic models, with a fourth general group of activities of an auxiliary character: (11)
* The classic development and emergency aid model (referred to later as Model 1) similar to that used by agencies such as the World Bank, United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and governmental foreign aid agencies. This model uses strategies whose overall goals are set outside the country, are funded by external loans or donations, are guided by external expertise and agents (whether full-time or as consultants) and where the local staff is primarily indigenous. Most religious development and emergency aid organizations follow this model. (12) For the purposes of this essay, Model 1 includes activities by faith-based groups that provide essentially secular services such as building and running schools, as well as managing health clinics and agricultural projects for local communities without obvious religious strings attached. It also includes activities supported financially by foreign governments or international agencies but provided by or through religious groups that in principle are committed to not using the funds for religious purposes and avoiding discrimination against non-members. Their economic models work within the economic processes typical of Western economies. It should be added that a number of agencies, such as OXFAM and CARE, are experimenting with models that elicit more local initiative and rights-based approaches, the objective of which is to move the initiative from external agents to intended beneficiaries. (13)
* Self-help models (Model 2) of economic and political development are driven by local leadership, though some financing and technical expertise may come from outside. This is a model used by some missionary organizations that focus on building local communities and developing community services like schools and health clinics. For example, Mennonites aim for this model. (14) Generally, groups that adopt this model retain a degree of independence and remain less visible to the international development community.
* Faith-based development (Model 3), occurs when religious beliefs and practices define development goals and the benefits that are expected to follow. This may or may not incorporate external inputs such as those which supported Christian missionaries prior to the Second World War, and most recently...
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