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Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.
The World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) carry out their mission to alleviate poverty and promote economic growth based on the advice of professional economists. But as Sarah Babb argues in Behind the Development Banks, these organizations have also been indelibly shaped by Washington politics—particularly by the legislative branch and its power of the purse. Tracing American influence on MDBs over three decades, this volume assesses increased congressional activism and the perpetual “selling” of banks to Congress by the executive branch. Babb contends that congressional reluctance to fund the MDBs has enhanced the influence of the United States on them by making credible America’s threat to abandon the banks if its policy preferences are not followed. At a time when the United States’ role in world affairs is being closely scrutinized, Behind the Development Banks will be necessary reading for anyone interested in how American politics helps determine the fate of developing countries.
This collection examines the power and transformative potential of movements that fight against poverty and inequality. Broadly, poverty politics are struggles to define who is poor, what it means to be poor, what actions might be taken, and who should act. These movements shape the sociocultural and political economic structures that constitute poverty and privilege as material and social relations. Editors Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood focus on the politics of insurgent movements against poverty and inequality in seven countries (Argentina, India, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, Singapore, and the United States). The contributors explore theory and practice in alliance politics, resistance movements, the militarized repression of justice movements, global counterpublics, and political theater. These movements reflect the diversity of poverty politics and the relations between bureaucracies and antipoverty movements. They discuss work done by mass and other types of mobilizations across multiple scales; forms of creative and political alliance across axes of difference; expressions and exercises of agency by people named as poor; and the kinds of rights and other claims that are made in different spaces and places. Relational Poverty Politics advocates for poverty knowledge grounded in relational perspectives that highlight the adversarial relationship of poverty to privilege, as well as the possibility for alliances across different groups. It incorporates current research in the field and demonstrates how relational poverty knowledge is best seen as a model for understanding how theory is derivative of action as much as the other way around. The book lays a foundation for realistic change that can directly attack poverty at its roots. Contributors: Antonádia Borges, Dia Da Costa, Sarah Elwood, David Boarder Giles, Jim Glassman, Victoria Lawson, Felipe Magalhães, Jeff Maskovsky, Richa Nagar, Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, LaShawnDa Pittman, Frances Fox Piven, Preeti Sampat, Thomas Swerts, and Junjia Ye.
The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty builds a common scholarly ground in the study of poverty by bringing together an international, inter-disciplinary group of scholars to provide their perspectives on the issue. Contributors engage in discussions about the leading theories and conceptual debates regarding poverty, the most salient topics in poverty research, and the far-reaching consequences of poverty on the individual and societal level.
In Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Thomas Sowell, one of the foremost conservative public intellectuals in this country, argues that political and ideological struggles have led to dangerous confusion about income inequality in America. Pundits and politically motivated economists trumpet ambiguous statistics and sensational theories while ignoring the true determinant of income inequality: the production of wealth. We cannot properly understand inequality if we focus exclusively on the distribution of wealth and ignore wealth production factors such as geography, demography, and culture. Sowell contends that liberals have a particular interest in misreading the data and chastises them for using income inequality as an argument for the welfare state. Refuting Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, and others on the left, Sowell draws on accurate empirical data to show that the inequality is not nearly as extreme or sensational as we have been led to believe. Transcending partisanship through a careful examination of data, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics reveals the truth about the most explosive political issue of our time.
Rural development remains a major challenge for governments of developing countries such as Pakistan. While a broad range of state and donor interventions impact the lives of poor farmers -who provide a significant proportion of the labour force - comprehensive consideration of these combined interactions remains inadequate. Focussing on Pakistan, this book discusses the political economy of agrarian poverty and underdevelopment in the region. The book provides an in-depth exploration of the combined impact of state and donor interventions, as well as that of resistance attempts, to alter the status quo within Pakistan. It questions the relevance of state institutions and policies contending with the problems of farmers in Pakistan, and how donor-led policies and programmes also influence their lives. It draws on findings that have emerged from interviews of over 200 respondents including government officials, donor agency representatives and different categories of poor farmers, during eleven months of fieldwork in the provinces of Sindh and Punjab. This research reveals some divergences between state and donor policies, but it finds more prominent convergences, which in turn enable the landed rural elite to benefit from market-based and capital-intensive processes of agricultural growth, without offering substantial opportunities for poor farmers. Reflecting the need to become less insular when discussing solutions to rural development, and demonstrating how state policies and institutions can interconnect with donor funded programmes, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Politics and Development Studies.
The Political Logic of Poverty Relief places electoral politics and institutional design at the core of poverty alleviation. The authors develop a theory with applications to Mexico about how elections shape social programs aimed at aiding the poor. They also assess whether voters reward politicians for targeted poverty alleviation programs.
Seekings and Nattrass explain why poverty persisted in South Africa after the transition to democracy in 1994. The book examines how public policies both mitigated and reproduced poverty, and explains how and why these policies were adopted. The analysis offers lessons for the study of poverty elsewhere in the world.
In the past dozen years, a number of American cities plagued by gun violence have tried to enact local laws to stem gun-related crime. Yet policymakers at the state and federal levels have very frequently stymied their efforts. This is not an atypical phenomenon. In fact, for a whole range of pressing social problems, state and federal policymakers ignore the demands of local communities that suffer from such ills the most. Lisa L. Miller asks, how does America's multi-tiered political system shape crime policy in ways that empower the higher levels of government yet demobilize and disempower local communities? After all, crime has a disproportionate impact on poor and minority communities, which typically connect crime and violence to broader social and economic inequities at the local level. As The Perils of Federalism powerfully demonstrates, though, the real control to set policy lies with the state and federal governments, and at these levels single-issue advocates--gun rights groups as well as prison, prosecutorial and law enforcement agencies--are able to shape policy over the heads of the people most affected by the issue. There is a tragic irony in this. The conventional wisdom that emerged from the Civil Rights era was that the higher levels of government--and the federal level in particular--best served the disadvantaged, while localities were most likely to ignore the social problems resulting from racial and economic inequality. Crime policy, Miller argues, teaches us an opposite lesson: as policy control migrates to higher levels, the priorities of low-income minority communities are ignored, the realities of racial and economic inequality are marginalized, and citizens lose their voices. Taking readers from the streets of Philadelphia to the halls of Congress, she details how and why our system operates in the way that it does. Ultimately, the book not only challenges what we think about the advantages of relying of federal power for sensible and fair solutions to longstanding social problems. It also highlights the deep disconnect between the structure of the American political system and the ideals of democratic accountability.
This work looks at inter-related post WWII case studies to analyze the ways in which different groups, mostly governmental agencies and emerging activist organizations, invoked the idea of "community" in anti-poverty initiatives during the late 1950s and 1960s.