File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2000/bhaskar.0009, message 28


Subject: Re: BHA: Development: Beyond the Poverty Paradigm
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 15:18:17 +0100
From: W.K.Olsen-AT-Bradford.ac.uk




My previous email of 31 August 2000 raised an issue which 
concerns 'development studies' specialists and anyone interested in the 
anti-globalisation movement.  I mentioned the human capabilities 
approach as an abstract ethical stance which might -- and I mean might -
- help in opposing neoliberalism.  Here I set up a couple direct 
questions for those who want to explore critical realism's inputs into 
the debate.

1.  Poverty has for long been a focus of left-wing policy in industrial 
countries as well as the so-called 'third world'.  However a 
reconceptualisation is needed if real development (genjine progress on 
human capabilities right across populations) is to occur.  SPeficially, 
calling people poor disempowers them straight away by engaging in a 
discourse which labels them as 'the other' and implicitly identifies 
the speaker as non-poor.  Once this division is established, it is 
almost impossible to get rid of it.  Bhaskar's idea of absenting the 
absence applies in the specific sense that the poverty discourses (all 
of them) have a dualism which absents general human achievements and 
their potential -- ie capabilities.  Then Bhaskar might suggest we 
should absent this absence by creating new discourses which avoid the 
poor/non-poor dualism.  I don't like the terminology but I have to 
admit that this is exactly what I mean by transcending the poverty 
paradigms (e.g. income poverty; income inequality; etc.).

Q: Is the poor/non-poor dualism already passe, out of date?  What do 
list members think?  It is out of date for me, yet I can't ignore it.  
It is too dominant, perhaps hegemonic. 

2.  Various schools of thought have tried to innovate and to escape 
this dominant discourse.  For instance the human development index 
(UNDP) is a direct outcome of the innovations in human-capability 
thinking at the UN.  Another example is the attempts to instigate 
participatory research.  However specific barriers to change have 
inhibited these new approaches from overcoming the dominance of 
theneoliberal paradigm, its GNP per capita figures, and its tendency to 
label the poor people as 'overpopulation' and a 'problem'.  These 
barriers are partly structural, e.g. class and ethnicity.  However 
class and ethnicity are themselves socially constructed and there is a 
dialectical relationship between the structures we may observe at a 
point in time and the actions taken to preserve/change/destroy them 
over time.  

Q: Is it enough to have a big debate about this dialectic amongst 
academics?  Isn't joint action in society part of the way we learn for 
ourselves how durable the poverty paradigm has been?  Is it important 
to keep stressing Critical Realism's potential contribution, and if so 
should this come under this heading or should it happily link up with 
headings like ecofeminist, environmentally-concerned, socialist, etc.?

My own answer is that we are all active in the economy.  Local detail 
and personal experience oare part of how we know.  -- anything!  (See 
S. Harding's various works for evidence to support this component of 
standpoint epistemology.  I would not support all the components of 
s.epist. but I do take very seriously the need to make more prominent 
our personal experiences as factors that have led us to change our 
thoughts.  Indeed portraying these experiences is quite tricky among 
academics precisely because of the Great Dualism ( rational vs. 
emotional; impersonal vs. personal; science vs. non-science etc.) (see 
sayer, 1992 for details).  Perhaps Alethia can operate as a forum for 
pieces that are radical-in-style as well as radical-in-content.)

3.  For development people it seems very important to answer the debate 
between Geoff Hodgson and Mervyn Hartwig about Andrew Collier and 
socialism.  (Alethia, vol. 3, no. 1, for instance)

Q:  Was Hodgson right to (mis)interpret critical realism as he did in 
Alethia?  Are all of Hartwig's criticisms of Hodgson's reply well 
founded?  

In my view at least one more reply to this debate needs to be offered 
in alethia - any volunteers? I noticed that Brian Pinkstone also argued 
that critical realism had been misinterpreted.  It seems to me that 
someone needs to take time to combat the misrepresentations and to 
publish that, perhaps as a joint paper, in an internet journal for easy 
access.

4.  Finally it seems that Nussbaum's work is only effective if it is 
expressed in abstract terms.  

Q.  Is this an area for critique by realists?  Could someone help get 
the ball rolling?

Wendy Olsen
(entered with a view to having a Development corner going in the 
critical realism bulletin board.)




>
>
> FROM:
> Wendy Olsen
> Lecturer in Quantitative Development Economics
> University of Bradford
> Bradford BD7 1DP
> 0044-1274-233965
> fax 0044-1274-235280
> email w.k.olsen-AT-bradford.ac.uk
>
>
>
>
>
>      --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
> 



Wendy Olsen
Senior Lecturer
Development & Project Planning Centre
Univ. of Bradford
Bradford BD7 1DP


     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

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