Rethinking Poverty: The (Dis)Empowerment Model

domingo, 8 de maio de 2016 21:37

JOHN FRIEDMANN

• We need to know what causes poverty, and whether

poverty is one big or many small questions.
• But first, there are some of the issues that need to be
separated and clarified

BUREAUCRATIC POVERTY

• They argued that the poor are not themselves to blame for
their condition, which should instead be reguarded as a result
of unfortunate circumstances (Reformers`rhetoric)
• The poor were poor, they said, because there weren`t enough
jobs of the right kind. And so, not unreaasonably, these
reformers concentrated on policies for full employment and on
"work and welfare" programs.
• State: Ordinary citizens are thus relieved of their responsibility
for the poor, confident that the problem is being handled by
qualified professionals.

• The state bureaucracy has evolved its own language:

○ Poverty Line
○ Absolute and relative poverty (chronic poor, borderline poor)
○ (Un)deserving poor

○ Pockets of Poverty

○ Target population

• It was a brief period of efflorescence for na alternative

development. By the end of the decade, however, the winds
were blowing from another direction.

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 THE BASIC NEEDS APROACH

• (1976)

THE CONCEPT OF NEED

WELFARE BUREAUCRACY

• Basic needs must be affordable (EUA v. Mozambique)

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• The intense debate over basic needs revealed the dilemma
facing development planners in the mid-seventies. These
dillemas were resolved, albeit temporarily, reflecting the current
balance of power among contending interests.

○ Economic growth vs. (re)distribution

○ Technocratic vs. Political determination of basic needs.

○ Production vs. Consumption

○ Markets vs. Planned allocations

POWER AS (DIS)EMPOWERMENT

• From the perspective of alternative development, the poor are

no longer regarded as wards of the state but people who,
despite enormous contraints, are actively engaged in the
production of their own lives and livelihood.

HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY

• Social power is the power associated with the civil society; it

is limited by contrasting forms of state, economic, and political
power.
• The power of civil society, finally, is gauged by the differential
acess of households to the bases of social power.

CONCLUSIONS

• These eight bases of social power are distint yet independent.

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 • However, household may set very different priorities for
themselves, pursuing very diferent ends.
• But the contraints on what can be locally achieved are severe,
for poverty is a condition of systematic disenpowerment
whereby implied strutural conditions keep the poor poor and
confine their acess to social power to the level of day-today
survival.
• It calls for the transformation of social to political power and a
politics capable of turning political claims into legitimate
entitlements.

6 Social Networks. Households with extensive horizontal networks

among family, friends, and neighbors have a large space of
maneuver than households without them.

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