Economic reforms and leftward policy shifts have historically been built on anti-poverty foundations

As mentioned in the introduction, past politics of representation with regard to poverty measures often played out over interpretations of colonialism or occupation. More recently, the politics of representation have been mainly concerned with struggles over controlling the narrative about the most recent phase of global capitalism, variously referred to as ‘neoliberal’ or euphemistically as ‘globalisation’. How are we to interpret and remember the legacy of this phase? Has it been progressive or regressive? These politics of representation need to be foregrounded by the historical context of recent debates about poverty. Much of the contemporary focus on poverty was spurred by concerns over the development collapses of the 1980 s and 1990 s – the so-called ‘lost decade’ of Latin America and the two ‘lost decades’ of sub-Saharan Africa. These concerns obviously built on their antecedents in the 1960 s and 1970 s, such as the increasing critiques of ‘growth without development’ or ‘gr

owth without equity,’ and the increasing emphasis of basic needs and redistribution in the global development agendas of that earlier period. These critiques emerged in tandem with more radical approaches to understand the persistence of poverty and marginalisation despite growth, such as by Latin American scholars of dependency. The severity of the international debt crisis in the early 1980 s and the radical rightward shift in economic ideology that informed crisis responses nonetheless made the previous contentions appear as a golden age in retrospect. Various international organisations tried to raise mainstream awareness about the enormous social costs of the stabilisation and adjustment programmes that followed in the wake of debt crises in the early 1980 s throughout most of Latin America, Africa and much of the Middle East. The emphasis shifted from ‘development with equity’ to ‘adjustment with equity’, or as coined by UNICEF at the time, ‘adjustment with a human face’ (Cornia et al. 1987 ). This momentum was carried into the first Human Development Reports (HDRs) of the UNDP in the early 1990 s, which gave a more human counterweight to the World Development Reports (WDRs) by the World Bank that were pushing the structural adjustment agenda. As noted by Saith ( 2006 ), the first HDRs were much more at odds with the World Bank than later in the decade, when their positions became more aligned (with the UNDP moving more towards the World Bank than the Bank moved towards the UNDP). As neoliberalism became triumphant in the early 1990 s with the end of the Cold War and then morphed into various post-versions later in the 1990 s when things became somewhat less triumphant, debate settled around the question of whether or not neoliberal reforms were making poor people better or worse off – ‘neoliberal’ in this sense referring specifically to policies of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation (see the note at the end of Chapter 2 ). This was stoked by the fact that the case for these reforms was often framed in terms of the interests of the poor (e.g., WB 1990 ). This was also characteristic of the rise of New Labour in the UK or or the New Democrats in the US, exemplified by Tony Blair. He was often known to speak in the name of the poor, arguing that inequality is not a problem so long as poverty is falling (which of course is a tricky position to take when poverty is measured relatively, as it is in Europe). 1 Similar arguments were made by the likes of Dollar and Kraay ( 2002 ) that growth is good for the poor, assuming of course that neoliberal policies are good for growth and constitute ‘good policy’, which is an ambiguity that these studies generally take for granted. This was also the period when the World Bank was going through its image reform under the presidency of James Wolfensohn, especially following the East Asian crisis of 1997 – 1998 and the antiglobalisation protest movements, such as in Seattle in 1999 , which gave prominence to the politics of representation. Control over the narrative of poverty and its reduction was tightened following the kerfuffle around the resignation of Joseph Stiglitz as Chief Economist of the Bank in 2000 , and then the debacle of the 2000 / 2001 WDR on ‘attacking poverty’, which saw the resignation of Ravi Kanbur as director and lead author of the WDR. These struggles spilled over into the erstwhile Millennium Deve­ lopment Goals (MDGs). The quandary of these goals was that formal clarification had been articulated about the policy means that should be used to achieve the targets of multidimensional poverty reduction despite the ample indicators provided to identify when these targets would be achieved. 2 Many obviously came to fill the void of policy guidelines, more or less reproducing the political and ideological spectrum of policy positions that pre-dated the MDGs. However, the MDGs arguably facilitated a de-politicisation of these policy debates and thereby gave the upper hand to the more orthodox positions within the spectrum.