Heloise Weber

The ‘new economy’ and social risk: banking on the poor?

The rise of the ‘new economy’ in many of the advanced capitalist states since the 1970s has entailed a re-organization of global social and political relations generally. These changes become apparent in analyses that focus on trends and shifts in the global political economy. In the context of these adjustments, discourses of ‘poverty reduction’ have come to prominence, with a particular financially steered strategy emerging as a key approach to ‘poverty reduction’ on a global scale, namely microcredit. I argue that the microcredit approach to poverty reduction is strategically embedded in the global political economy. It has been appropriated primarily to facilitate the implementation of financial sector liberalization on a global scale. Additionally, the contexts in which these programmes are implemented also reflect the motive of achieving a form of social disciplining aimed at commanding compliance for neo-liberal restructuring more generally. I develop this argument through an analysis of the way in which microcredit is located in – and implemented through – the institutional policy framework of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the consequent implications this has for the realization of the wider objectives of these institutions in global politics. The argument elucidates the relationship between efforts to advance the imperatives of the ‘new economy’, the microcredit approach to poverty reduction, and the (re)-production of social risk.

Reconstituting the ?Third World?? Poverty Reduction and Territoriality in the Global Politics of Development

This article explores the relationship between the politics of international development and the reproduction of global inequality. I argue that contemporary discourses about— and the practices of—‘development for developing countries’ represent an attempt to reconstitute the political utility of the ‘Third World’. In an era of globalisation the deployment of the notion of a Third World of ‘developing countries’ which require immediate, systemic attention through the discourse and practice of international development continues to provide a way of both disciplining and displacing the global dimension of social and political struggle. I refer to this dynamic in terms of the political utility of the Third World, which, I argue, has been conducive to the organisation of global capitalism and the management of social and political contradictions of inequality and poverty. I develop this argument by drawing on the historical implications and legacy of ‘international development’ as practised in and on the Third World and through a critical analysis of the methodological premises that constitute international development. I illustrate this by drawing on a key strategy aimed ostensibly at development: the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (prsp) approach, promulgated by the World Bank and the imf, which I discuss in relation to the ‘development agenda’ inaugurated during the 1999 wto meeting in Doha (Qatar). I argue that the ideology and practice of the global politics of international development reinforce the conditions of global inequality, and must be transcended as both an analytical framework and an organising principle of world politics. While the prsp and related approaches are currently presented as key elements in the building of the ‘architecture for (international) development’, what is emerging is a form of governance that attempts to foreclose social and political alternatives.

A political analysis of the PRSP initiative: Social struggles and the organization of persistent relations of inequality

Abstract The current global development project appears to be premised on the assumption that underlying political debates over development have been settled. An upshot of this is that development is reduced to the theoretical, ideological and legal framework of a neo-liberal political order. However, implicit, and sometimes explicit, political dynamics of development can be rendered from a perspective that foregrounds social struggles. I offer a political analysis of the PRSP initiative by examining its evolution and implications considered within social and political contexts, and by specific reference to the ‘poverty reduction’ interventions that emerged in the 1980s. I argue that the PRSP initiative is best understood as the formation of a comprehensive extension of neo-liberal strategic responses that emerged in the 1980s. In this context, I discuss the example of microcredit schemes in relation to the PRSP process and demonstrate the analytical significance of micro-political social relations for political analyses of development. The approach I adopt reveals social struggles as relationally constitutive of formations of a hegemonic development discourse otherwise ostensibly rendered in de-contextualized terms. From the perspective of critical development analysis such struggles are the concrete expressions of the contradictions immanent to the dialectic of development through inequality and immiseration in the (re)production of social power.

GATS in context: development, an evolving lex mercatoria and the Doha Agenda

As the hub of the organization for world trade, the WTO has been subject to critical scrutiny from various political and theoretical persuasions. Beyond merely the exchange of goods across borders, the complex and expansive WTO framework is one that encompasses juridical and political capacity to oversee and facilitate the regulation of ‘property rights’ on a global scale. Therefore, it is not surprising that the social and political organization of world trade law is increasingly subject to controversies over its nature and implications for world politics. One field where these play out prominently is the one marked by competing social and political visions of development, with advocates of the world trade agenda considering development to be premised upon the consolidation and entrenchment of lex mercatoria (or commercial law). The key institution to oversee global development, in this view, is the WTO. However, important evaluations of the trajectories of development are taking place outside the framework of this particular and recent trade-development discourse. Through a critical appraisal of this mainstream trade-development discourse we draw attention to its ahistorical nature and ask, what is the relationship of the normative and substantive underpinnings of the WTO Doha ‘Development’ agenda with world historical development? We advance two politically significant points. The first pertains to the relationship between trade, the political economy of development, and poverty. The second, and related point is essentially a methodological comment on the framing of development. The state-centric groundings of the trade and development agenda, as well as its rationalist assumptions, obscure substantive analysis of the social and political implications of global development in relationalterms. If viewed from the perspective of social experience, the Doha Development Round fails as a ‘development’ agenda. Against this backdrop, we draw on the example of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) – a key component of the Doha Round – and suggest that the theory of poverty that underpins orthodox development theory serves to legitimize, stabilize and advance a particular politically steered world order: this theory is constituted through an abstraction from social realities, and thus seeks to stabilise and ‘naturalize’ social power relations conducive to ‘development through inequality’.

Beyond state-building: Global governance and the crisis of the nation-state system in the 21st century

The conclusion to this special issue reiterates some of the wider themes sketched out at the beginning and in the various contributions. At the same time it also foreshadows ways to move beyond nation-building or statebuilding as they are presently constituted. In contrast to nation-building in the cold war era, the instrumentalities available in the new age of statebuilding (as it is increasingly termed) are far more limited than they were in the decades immediately after 1945. In the context of the deepening crisis of the UN-centred nation-state system and the wider US-centred post-cold war and post-9/11 era, efforts at state-building in Iraq (which currently involves a major US occupation force) and elsewhere (where the USA or the international presence generally, and the geopolitical significance more specifically, is less profound) are more constrained than at any previous point in the history of the post-1945 nation-state system. As suggested at the beginning of this special issue, there are many trends that define the post-cold war era. One that is of particular importance in relation to statebuilding is that the contemporary world order can be characterised as having completed the long and uneven transition from exhausted colonialism and we have now entered a new era of exhausted internationalism. Thus, the prospects for successful US-led nation-building in the Middle East and elsewhere are the most limited they have ever been. Also, as suggested at the outset and generally confirmed by the contributions to this special issue, the focus needs to shift from quantitative approaches to nationand state-building, which either ignore the wider historical context or assume that the right set of strategies can succeed regardless of the particular context. There is instead a profound need to look for and articulate new critical creative paths to achieving prosperity and peace in the post-cold war era.

A Political Analysis of the Formal Comparative Method: Historicizing the Globalization and Development Debate

Abstract A large number of international institutions and policy makers advocate for the potential of globalization to deliver on the promises of development, and have reorganized development and poverty reduction strategies in a comprehensive way. This is reflected, for example, in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper and Millennium Development Goals (MDG) initiatives. These strategies are globally constituted, although they are to be implemented within national domains as national development strategies. From this perspective, globalization and development are conceptualized in ahistorical terms, while methodologically the approach remains corroborated by the formal comparative method. I argue that a critical re-evaluation of the formal comparative method is necessary not merely to rectify a methodological problem, but also to expose the politics of methodological choices. The formal comparative method is inextricably underpinned by temporal and spatial delineations that reproduce a particularly problematic analytical framework with significant political implications, not least because it obscures the globally constituted social dimensions of struggles for recognition and redistribution. Un gran número de instituciones internacionales y funcionarios responsables de tomar decisiones apoyan el potencial de la globalización para cumplir con las promesas de desarrollo y con haber reorganizado el desarrollo y las estrategias de reducción de la pobreza de una manera más amplia. Esto se refleja por ejemplo, en las iniciativas de PRSP (Documentos Estratégicos para la Reducción de la Pobreza, por sus siglas en inglés) y de MDG (Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio, por sus siglas en inglés). Estas estrategias se han constituido globalmente, sin embargo son para implementarse dentro de los dominios ‘nacionales’. Desde esta perspectiva, la globalización y el desarrollo se han conceptualizado en términos no históricos, mientras que metodológicamente, el enfoque permanece corroborado por el método comparativo. Yo sostengo que una reevaluación crítica del método comparativo es necesaria no solamente para rectificar un problema metodológico, sino más bien para exponer la política de las opciones metodológicas. El método comparativo es inseparablemente sustentado por delineaciones temporales y espaciales que reproducen un esquema particularmente analítico problemático que sufre de implicaciones políticas; cuando menos porque oscurece las dimensiones sociales constituidas globalmente de luchas para el reconocimiento y la redistribución.

Reproducing Inequalities through Development: The MDGs and the Politics of Method

Abstract This article is a critical inquiry into particular methodological means underlying analyses of development, inequalities, and poverty in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) discourse. A populist approach to poverty reduction, the MDG initiative has gained much exposure at the expense of a closer scrutiny of the specific methodological premises (and their implications) underlining the development frameworks through which the goals were to be realized. A critical examination of premises of this kind demonstrates the way in which the application of specific methods in analyses of development and poverty is carefully crafted to serve discernible ideological ends. In order to explicate this by way of an example, I draw on MDG1 (and target 2 with reference to hunger), which I discuss in relation to its integration with the overarching development objective of realizing economic growth. My aim is to demonstrate how dominant explanations and understandings of poverty and hunger, social struggles for fundamental entitlements, and ultimately ‘development’, are construed in ways that are premised on abstractions from actual social and political relations; they are framed as ‘independent variables’ external to the very policies and strategies of international development. The critical engagement offered in my analysis is timely, given the extent to which the MDG initiative and the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals agenda have been presented without any attempt to answer to decades (and more) of critical arguments that offer more rigorous and sustained understandings of inequalities, including deprivations of basic life sustaining needs and fundamental entitlements.

When Goals Collide: Politics of the MDGs and the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals Agenda

This paper examines problematic assumptions underpinning the MDG initiative and the draft post-2015 development agenda. Specifically, the paper argues that the latter’s seventeen goals and targets likely will lead to significant political problems, which will affect their prospects and their legitimacy. Engaging with the politics of disempowerment and exclusion, the paper contends that goals related to the strengthening of governance mechanisms have the potential to be used to justify disciplinary measures aimed at those struggling for fundamental entitlements, rights, and alternative approaches of development. To allow such an outcome, the author argues, would be tantamount to further entrenching a development framework that puts the promises of fundamental entitlements continuously out of reach.

Politics of global social relations: organising ‘everyday lived experiences’ of development and destitution

This article offers a political analysis of development and poverty reduction initiatives from a social-relational perspective. More specifically, the author draws on the example of microfinance schemes to illustrate the way in which poverty reduction policy is increasingly advanced in response to social resistance to experiences of destitution, which is itself produced through development. The perspective the author advances disrupts conventional framings of development and poverty in terms of independent domains abstracted from social relations of power and resistances. Furthermore, it brings into view the global dimension of these social relations, articulated and co-constituted through a range of actors across different levels of governance. Through the social-relational lens, the development paradox is also revealed: development processes have produced destitution which, in turn, becomes the target of poverty reduction (‘development’) initiatives, which are themselves yet again premised upon either realising economic growth or maintaining, at a fundamental level, social relations of inequality and dispossession. This paradox is neither explicable nor discernable from orthodox conceptions of the international political economy of development.

Politics of ‘leaving no one behind’: contesting the 2030 sustainable development goals agenda

Abstract In this article, I develop a critical analysis of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda and its commitment to ‘leave no one behind’. The Preamble to the Resolution on the SDGs adopted by the United Nations General Assembly stated the following: ‘We are resolved to free the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet. (…) As we embark on this collective journey, we pledge that no one will be left behind’. Through a close examination of the SDG initiative—and aligned concrete policy proposals—I demonstrate that the project to ‘leave no one behind’ rests on specific ideological premises: it is designed to promote and consolidate a highly contested neo-liberal variant of capitalist development. The SDGs are framed as a universal project, with quite substantial institutional monitoring mechanisms aimed at ensuring the successful implementation of aligned policies. Indeed, as I demonstrate, the implementation of highly contested neoliberal policies are themselves explicit goals of the SDG agenda. In this respect, the SDGs differ significantly from the Millennium Development Goal initiative. The argument I develop demonstrates that the SDG agenda may be aimed in part at undermining political struggles that aspire for more socially just and ecologically sustainable approaches to development. Overall, I argue that the explicit commitment to ‘leave no one behind’ is a discourse that is strategically deployed to justify the implementation of a highly problematic political project as the framework of global development. This is a framework that privileges commercial interests over commitments to provide universal entitlements to address fundamental life-sustaining needs. Political struggles over development will continue against the ideology of the SDG project and for transformative shifts for actually sustainable development.