Title: Decentring Poverty, Reworking Government: Social Movements and States in the Government of Poverty
Abstract: Abstract Abstract The significance of social movements for pro-poor political and social change is widely acknowledged. Poverty reduction has assumed increasing significance within development debates, discourses and programmes – how do social movement leaders and activists respond? This paper explores this question through the mapping of social movement organisations in Peru and South Africa. We conclude that for movement activists 'poverty' is rarely a central concern. Instead, they represent their actions as challenging injustice, inequality and/or development models with which they disagree, and reject the simplifying and sectoral orientation of poverty reduction interventions. In today's engagement with the poverty-reducing state, their challenge is to secure resources and influence without becoming themselves subject to, or even the subjects of, the practices of government. Acknowledgements The research was conducted thanks to a generous grant from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID), grant number RES-167-25-0170. The paper also draws on material prepared for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, UNRISD. We thank Sam Hickey for his guidance and comments, and acknowledge with gratitude the comments of two reviewers. Notes For reference to some exceptions see discussion in Bebbington (2007 Bebbington, A. 2007. Social movements and the politicization of chronic poverty. Development and Change, 38(5): 793–818. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and CPRC (2008). We use hydrocarbons as shorthand for 'oil and gas'. Though of course, many movements and NGOs take issue with an MDG approach to poverty reduction, emphasising instead rights-based approaches, not least in the water sector (Nelson, 2007 Nelson, P. 2007. Human rights, the millennium development goals, and the future of development cooperation. World Development, 35(12): 2041–2055. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Nevertheless in South Africa there is a long tradition of NGOs working in what is broadly defined as the 'urban sector'. The exception appears to be those cases (for example, India, South Africa, Brazil) where there is a greater potential to secure state financed subsidies – in such instances, higher levels of government have become a target for movement activities (Ballard et al., 2006 Ballard, R., Habib, A. and Valodia, I. 2006. Voices of Protest: Social Movements in Post-Apatheid South Africa, Durban: University of KwaZulu Press. [Google Scholar]). As Perreault (2006 Perreault, T. 2006. From the Guerra Del Agua to the Guerra Del Gas: resource governance, neoliberalism and popular protest in Bolivia. Antipode, 38(1): 150–172. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]: 151) notes, one of the exceptional aspects of the struggle against privatisation in Cochabamba was the fact that it transcended the local. Evelina Dagnino (2008 Dagnino, E. 2008. "Challenges to participation, citizenship and democracy: perverse confluence and displacement of meanings". In Can NGOs Make a Difference: The Challenge of Development Alternatives, Edited by: A., Bebbington, D., Mitlin and S., Hickey. 55–70. London: Zed Books. [Google Scholar]) gives a personalised analytical account of the many things that went wrong in movement alliances with the PT in Brazil, while the relationships between MAS in Bolivia and the indigenous movement are also increasingly strained. These papers are available at http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/socialmovements/ The interests of private construction companies in the programme design and realisation have also been noted (see Gilbert, 2002 Gilbert, A. 2002. 'Scan globally; reinvent locally': reflecting on the origins of South Africa's capital housing subsidy policy. Urban Studies, 39(10): 1911–1933. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). http://www.housing.gov.za/default.htm (media release, 15 December 2008. Accessed 15 February 2009). A broader network of organisations with a common political purpose are cooperating under the banner of Social Movements Indaba; for a summary of their position see, for example, http://apf.org.za/article.php3?id_article=177. Sachs himself provides a further example of the integration of state and civil society in respect of the rights movement; he is a Justice of the Constitutional Court and was an active lawyer within the anti-apartheid movement. Robins (2008 Robins, S. 2008. From Revolution to Rights in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press. [Google Scholar]) argues that many movement activists blend rights campaigning with the more pragmatic realities of clientelist politics. For example, one representative of SECC spoke of encouraging old age pensioners to build rooms to rent, thereby augmenting their own income, and developing a concrete example of community controlled densification which was a state objective raised in negotiations with the local community and in which the state was also developing its own initiative. The redistribution of economic and financial benefits from mining has not been as high on CONACAMI's agenda as one might expect perhaps because the tax redistribution mechanism passes through the regional and local governments that traditionally ignore and exclude the communities that are CONACAMI's core constituency. We refer to our own interviews and discussions with the industry conducted in Peru, Ecuador and the UK. There is a wider issue here. In the research, it was evident that leaders of CONACAMI and AIDESEP did not view such NGOs and sympathisers as being part of the movement. While welcoming their support, they did not see them as insiders. Other observers would be more inclined to see these NGOs as part of the same movement – understood as an assemblage of actors, organisations, ideas and discourses all pulling in the same normative direction. While this is in part a difference of view on the meaning of the term 'movement' it also suggests a difference of viewpoint on the permissible class and ethnic base of social movements. The effectiveness of direct action is perhaps what has induced an increasing criminalisation of protest – a phenomenon that may have made some movement organisations less inclined to continue using forms of direct action. There are echoes here of both Arturo Escobar's argument (Escobar, 1995 Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]) and Tania Li's (2007 Li, T. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics, Durham: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) more recent rehearsal and elaboration of the idea. As, arguably, is also the case in South Africa and Bolivia.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-08-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref', 'pubmed']
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Cited By Count: 42
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