‘We Are All Poor Here’: Economic Difference,Social Divisiveness and Targeting Cash Transfers in Sub-Saharan Africa

While the central thrust of Michael Lipton's work has been the crucial role of productivity gains in small farm agriculture for rural poverty reduction, in many sub-Saharan African countries this desirable outcome has stubbornly refused to materialise, and growing numbers of rural poor people are found persistently to fail to secure even minimal acceptable levels of food consumption. A social protection policy response is to target social cash transfers to the chronic extreme poor. This article focuses on the level of cash transfers relative to income differences between households in the bottom half of the income distribution, and the social tensions that arise from beneficiary selection and exclusion. It is found that cash transfers to target groups such as ‘the poorest 10 per cent’ or the ‘ultra-poor labour constrained’ must be set low, even below the welfare levels they seek to achieve, if they are to avoid socially invidious reshuffling of the income distribution. The article identifies critical trade-offs between the cost and coverage of different types of social transfer, their social acceptability and their political traction, helping to explain the reluctance of governments to adopt scaled-up poverty-targeted transfers as the preferred form of social cash transfer to those most in need in their societies.     

Young Married Women in the Russian Countryside: Women's Networks,Communication and Power

This essay explores the experiences of recently married young women living in rural Russia in the village of Karsun in the Ul’yanovsk Oblast’. It analyses the connections between women in rural communities looking at social networks and the power relations inherent within them. The ways in which forms of power among and between women (as well as between women and men) impact on young women's agency are critically appraised through an analysis of what this essay terms forms of ‘women's power’. The essay also shows how women's discussions of their experiences reflect the problems that the perceived physical and emotional absences of men present for younger married women and their attempts to develop forms of autonomy.     

Economic Transformation Outside the Law: Corruption,Trust in Public Institutions and the Informal Economy in Transition Countries of Central and Eastern Europe

This article considers the role of the informal economy in Central and Eastern European post-communist countries. The informal economy is defined as the ‘black’ economy, which is monetised but outside the law (often illegal) on the one hand and the ‘household’ and ‘social’ economies which are non-monetised and non-legal in the sense that they are outside of legislation. The article shows that in some countries the black economy is very important for supporting household incomes (Serbia and Croatia) and in other countries the household or social economies are predominant (especially Romania and Ukraine). In a third group of countries the formal economy predominates over other economies (especially the Czech Republic and Hungary). The article goes on to look at what kinds of people participate in these different economies and concludes that whilst the household and social economies are a social safety net for the poor, the elderly and those in rural areas, the black economy is more likely to be an option for those who are already better off to improve their incomes. The article considers the implications of this for attitudes to the legitimacy of the public realm and finds that greater participation in the informal economy is associated with both loss of trust in public institutions and increased perception of corruption. Therefore it is hypothesised that economic activities that take place ‘outside the law’ could lead to a decline in confidence in the state, although there are important variations between countries.     

Experiential and empathetic engagements with global poverty: ‘Live below the line so that others can rise above it’

In recent years events that physically challenge Northern publics have emerged as a new form of engagement with global poverty. In this article we examine the ‘Live Below the Line’ (LBTL) campaign, which asks participants to live on a small amount of money equivalent to the international poverty line for five days, as an example of experiential exercises that complement physical challenges with the simulation of some aspect of poor people’s lives. Drawing on interviews with participants in the 2013 New Zealand campaign, we argue that LBTL creates a limited understanding of poverty focused on poor food consumption caused by low income. While participants were able to have a more embodied and empathetic engagement with poverty, they projected their own physical and emotional sensations onto imagined poor others. As a result, stereotypes about those living in poverty were reinforced rather than challenged.     

All Quiet on the Eastern Front? Media Images of the West and Russian Foreign Political Identity1

National and foreign political identities are discursively constructed, not least through the media. Starting from the contention that Europe serves as the main Other used to define the idea of Russia, this article uses media texts (online and press) to analyse how Russia is constructed as a foreign policy actor in relation to Europe and the ‘West’ more generally. In so doing, the article draws on three discourses around Russia’s foreign policy: ‘Russia as Europe’; ‘Russia as part of Greater Europe’; and ‘Russia as Alternative Europe’. The article suggests that discursive developments in the 2000s have paved the way for a return of Cold War discourses in characterising relations between Russia and the West.     

Core Poverty,Vagueness and Adaptation: A New Methodology and Some Results for South Africa

Amartya Sen has argued that poverty is a vague concept. This paper develops a methodology for applying a framework which uses a ‘supervaluationist’ account of vagueness in the context of poverty. Within this framework people or households are termed ‘core poor’ if there is no ambiguity about whether or not they are poor. The framework is applied using data from a survey on the ‘Essentials of Life’ conducted in three locations in South Africa in 2001. The methodology relates the data to the framework using an insight of Max Black's. While the application of the methodology is, in its very nature, somewhat arbitrary, we illustrate how it can lead to an estimate of core poverty which differs from standard measures of the ‘ultra-poor’ and ‘most deprived’. Finally, the possibility that respondents may have adapted to their living conditions is investigated. A first look at the data does not provide conclusive evidence of such adaptation.     

Europeanisation and post-peasant populism in Eastern Europe

On the basis of an examination of rural social structure, traditionalist narratives and an agrarian imaginary resulting from uneven development, this article investigates the forms of political mobilisation which materialise in East European politics as ‘post-peasant populism’. Focusing on grassroots mobilisation, an analysis of the annual Corpus Christi ritual in the city of Przemy?l, south-east Poland, serves as the basis for an exploration of the theme of socially sensitive post-peasant populism as an alternative to post-socialist capitalism. This populism relies on the politicisation of the rural past and is currently influenced by ‘Europeanisation’.     

Chronic poverty and entitlement theory

This paper examines chronic poverty in the developing country context within the entitlement theory approach. The dialogue on entitlement theory originally introduced by Sen is extended here to explore poverty and its persistence, or chronic poverty. A conceptual framework is presented, in which poverty and its persistence are explained within the context of the individual's economic and non-economic situation and development incentives. These attributes are influenced by the individual's entitlements. It is shown that poor endowments and resource base are important causes of persistent poverty. Policies aimed at reducing poverty therefore must address problems associated with improving the entitlements of individuals and households. The definition of ‘entitlements’ in the paper is not restricted to material possessions—the economic entitlements of the individual or the household—but is extended to incorporate the individual's skills, education and productive ability—the non-economic entitlements. The discussion is rooted in the increasing awareness of multidimensional poverty. The paper focuses on rural poverty in certain parts of India, where most of India's chronic poverty is situated. Over a million people can be classified as chronically poor in terms of duration, severity and deprivation. This is despite the government's commitment to the eradication of poverty since the early 1950s, with a total expenditure of nearly $7 billion in the past 50 years.     

‘Dear Mr President’. The blogosphere as arena for communication between people and power

Internet use in Russia is increasing rapidly. The former president of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, has actively utilized the Internet for political purposes, and promoted its use among state officials and politicians in Russia. This article examines the online communication between Medvedev and the Russian people, as seen through his official kremlin.ru weblog. The article combines two research fields – the Internet and demography – mapping the publicly generated discourse of demography as articulated on Medvedev's blog. Furthermore, the author assesses the communication between the authorities and the people, showing how it can be mismatched as individuals ‘talk past each other’.     

Political Capital,Everyday Politics and Moral Obligations: Understanding the Political Strategies of Various Elites and the Poor in Kyrgyzstan

Using the Bourdieusian framework to analyse the nature of social stratification in rural Kyrgyzstan, this article examines how local politics is strategised by different groups in the social field. The article suggests two modifications to the Bourdieusian framework to reflect better the nature of local politics. First, despite lacking significant capital holdings, poor groups undertake everyday resistance and mediated politics. Second, intellectual and traditional elites engage in the politics of ‘doing the right thing’, motivated by a sense of moral obligation. The article provides a critical challenge to the concept of clan and elite-led politics which is often used to explain events in Central Asia.     

Post-development and Poverty: an assessment

This article presents a critical assessment of the post-development critique of poverty, distinguishing between claims made about how poverty is represented in ‘modern’ poverty analysis (the ‘representations critique’) and claims about trends in, and causal analysis of, consumption poverty (the ‘marginalisation thesis’). In general empirical evidence does not support ‘headline’ claims concerning the lack of correspondence of consumption poverty to local needs and the worsening of consumption poverty. There is support for other positions concerning the relativity of nutritional adequacy norms and the limits of ‘standard’ causal analysis of poverty. These latter elements, however, add little to existing critiques which are well known in the poverty literature.     

Principal,Agent or Bystander? Governance and Leadership in Chinese and Russian Villages

Abstract

What does ‘local self-governance’ mean in post-communist Russia and China? In order to answer this question, the article focuses on village-level governance in both countries by employing a four-fold typology of village leadership in public affairs. In both countries, the withdrawal of state power from local communities and the introduction of legislative ‘self-government’ has not brought autonomy to the local and community levels. The findings here suggest that the single ‘state agent’ category of village leadership that emerged under the communist regime is shifting to become one of the remaining three types, ‘principal’, ‘local agent’ and ‘bystander’. There was a growing tendency towards a non-autonomous type of ‘bystander’-style leadership in China and the ‘local agent’ type in Russia. This article suggests that the development of these local governance styles should not be attributed to a common transitional process departing from the communist past, but is the outcome of four factors that influence village leaders in two countries: administrative distance between local and village level, village social structure, fiscal arrangements and electoral relationships.     

Grounding the State: Devolution and Development in India's Panchayats

Decentralisation is commonly defended on the grounds that it will bring government closer to people, thereby creating political structures that are more transparent and accountable to poor and marginal groups in society. However, a problem that is well recognised in the decentralisation literature is that the devolution of power will not necessarily improve the performance and accountability of local government. Indeed, in many cases, decentralisation simply empowers local elites to capture a larger share of public resources, often at the expense of the poor. Reflecting on these relatively long-standing problems, an important strand of scholarship has argued that central government can play a central role in counterbalancing the forces that tend to disfavour the poor. In this article, we aim to inform this scholarship by reflecting on the interface between local government and local people in two Indian States: Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Madhya Pradesh (MP). Drawing upon 12 months of primary research, we argue that although the government of AP did not devolve power to the extent that proponents of decentralisation would have liked, its populist approach to certain forms of poverty reduction empowered the poor in ways that the more ambitious decentralisation agenda in MP did not. This, we argue, was due in part to the fact that MP's decentralisation process failed to challenge the well-entrenched power of the village chiefs, the sarpanches. But the discrepancy can also be explained in terms of the historical evolution of ‘development populism’ in AP. In particular, we argue that the strong performance of programmes aimed at subsidising rice for low income households and providing credit to women's ‘self-help groups’ (SHGs) was part of the State government's wider political strategy of enhancing and maintaining electoral support among women, scheduled castes and the poor.     

Neoclassical and structural analysis of poverty: winning the ‘Economic Kingdom’ for the poor in Southern Africa

In situations characterised by historical injustice in the distribution of economic resources, such as in many southern African ‘settler’ countries, there is a powerful intuitive case that ameliorative and palliative public policy is insufficient to significantly affect poverty reduction. This is because of the dulling effects on growth caused by significant structural inequality in the distribution of resources. However, the proposition that inequality is a problem for poverty reduction is contentious. This article reviews the neoclassical and structuralist literatures on the relationship between growth, inequality and poverty. It argues that the first is inconclusive and, furthermore, can only be so, while the second requires to be made more relevant to the discussions of how redistribution and inequality relate in legitimate policy and practice. The concept of property regimes can help here, within a more contextual understanding of development in practice as not necessarily involving growth and economic progress, but as being subject to periodic phases of ‘de‐development’, or well‐being retrogression. The paper concludes that state‐sponsored redistribution policy has an important role to play in changing underlying property regimes for the benefit of the poor in southern Africa. Inequality does matter, and a consideration of radical, redistributive social change is worth rehabilitating as an efficient means of reducing poverty, particularly in situations of low or fluctuating growth. This consideration, in turn, requires a political acceptance of the legitimacy of a broader role for economic public policy and state action.     

Urbanisation and the Shifting of Boundaries: Contemporary Transformations in Kinship and Child Circulation amongst the Sakha

In this article, we outline some of the most salient features of kinship transformations amongst the Sakha of northeastern Siberia, including the creation of new social and symbolic boundaries between individual subgroups and members of extended family groups leading to de-traditionalisation of Sakha kinship practices. We specifically focus on the shifts in people’s views on personhood and children. One of the key mechanisms of maintaining kinship-based economies and relations, ‘child circulation’ is losing its previous value in an urban environment. We suggest that these transformations have become more visible as a result of the mass migration of a traditionally rural population to towns.     

Aid as an encounter at the interface: the complexity of the global fight against poverty

International development discourse has recently shifted its focus from top‐down economic adjustment to participative anti‐poverty policy. This shift hints at an acknowledgement of the local complexities within the poverty process and at a need to listen to and develop actions with the ‘poor’. But, whereas the mainstream argument remains couched in a technical framework, we argue that the fight against poverty is inevitably political. Conceptualising the aid industry as a set of global–local interfaces, it follows that a closer look at ‘participation’ in anti‐poverty interventions is needed to come to grips with the political issues involved. Four issues are discussed: the complexity of local ‘participation’, given the ‘polycephalous’ character of third world societies; the power biases in the aid chain; the potential problem of ‘false consciousness’; and the ambiguities of the role of local development brokers. We conclude that anti‐poverty policy is in need of ‘interface experts’, who, through ‘provocation’ can beget ‘participation’.     

Civil war and the coalition government of democratic Kampuchea

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.     

The monetisation of l'goty: Changing patterns of welfare politics and provision in Russia

This article explores the contentious ‘monetisation’ of in-kind benefits (l'goty) that converted them into cash allowances and redistributed responsibility for welfare provision between federal and local governments. We provide an empirical account of these reforms and discuss their implications for the conceptualisation, financing and regional dimensions of welfare provision in Russia. We find that budgetary pressures were not the primary motivation for the recent changes, nor were old forms of social provision fully abolished. Monetisation launched a process that shifts responsibility for well-being onto individuals and institutionalises the spatial differentiation of welfare provision.     

Queer Coalitions: An Examination of Political Resistance to the Russian Migration Law

Abstract

Migration policy in Russia is implemented by a variety of actors, such as state officials, market actors, and social activists. In the implementation of migration policy, they inevitably interact with one another. Having examined the categories used by the people involved in the implementation of migration policy, I explore the potential of coalition-building in this process. In order to scrutinise these fluid political forms, I make use of the concept of ‘queer coalitions’. This concept draws on literature in queer theory, which I argue is also productive for the analysis of current political actions in the migration domain.     

Promoting neoliberal ideology in Finnish rural community development: the creation of new moral actors

ABSTRACT

Today’s political ambitions are based on the neoliberal aspiration to diminish the state’s role and responsibilities, and to transfer those responsibilities to local communities and individuals in ways that idealise those communities, promising to ‘give power to the people’. Instead of highlighting individualism, neoliberalism now celebrates communities and participation. This article deals with the effects of this ideology with regard to Finnish rural policy objectives. Drawing on Finnish village action programmes as data, we argue that these ideological views aim to transform individuals and create new moral actors. Our research indicates that Finland’s rural policy objectives invoke actors that are responsible for their communities, have an ‘enterprising spirit’, and are change-friendly and innovative. However, the ideology disregards the economic and social preconditions and resources necessary for building affluent communities and villages, which are difficult to attain when there is less government involvement. Thus, rural communities face increasing demands and less government involvement.