Poverty, Conflict and Reconstruction

It's Monday morning and I'm at a computer in the library, about to get back to my paper for my module: Conflict Analysis. But I'm going to write this post first.  It's about my course of study, like Kurt, letting you know what I've actually been up to.

I'm enrolled in a 1 year Master's (MA) program (or course, as they say here - it's all very confusing for North American's like me) at the University of Manchester (Manchester, UK). I'm just completing term 1.  Classes started on Sept. 27 and ended (for me) last week.  The assessments for my classes (or modules) this term are all 3000 word essays - no exams. So that's what I'm working hard on now, trying to get the bulk of the 4 essays done before New Years so I can have a bit of a holiday with my wife's family. 3 of the 4 essays are due on January 5, 2011.  Then I have a whole month off before term 2 begins.

So, back to my course of study. When I orginally applied, I chose a pathway (within the MA International Development course) called "Economics and Management of Rural Development". Over the course of the induction week (induction always makes me think of a certain process to get babies out more quickly, but here it means "introduction"), I realized that the courses/modules that really grabed my attention were all part of a pathway called "Poverty, Conflict and Reconstruction". So I switched.

I registered for the full load of four modules:

1. Conflict Analysis - an overview of theories that have been developed to explain why conflict (we focused primarily on international or inter-ethnic conflict) occurs. This is not a standard Development module.  It doesn't deal directly with questions of poverty reduction or economic development.  But it's fascinating in terms of thinking about why conflict occurs and, especially, why conflict is prolonged and how conflict affects development. Theories we've looked at include: structural violence - the idea that economic or social structures that limit peoples freedoms constitute a form of violence; greed and grievence - the ideas that people are motived to be violent out of greed or out of a sense of deprivation; and the impact of history and culture on violent conflict - that's what my paper is about.

2. Poverty and Development - a study of poverty and the relatively new poverty agenda in development, whereby poverty reduction has become a primary focus (at least on paper).  In the past, Development has focused largely on stimulating macroeconomic growth in developing countries, assuming that poverty reduction would follow 'naturally'. Here my paper will look at the extent to which the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategies acknowledge issues of exclusion.  In other words, does this new poverty-focused aid vehicle really help to include the very poorest and marginalized who are often excluded from the benefits of economic growth.

3. Perspectives on Development - a broad overview of the history of Development and of major development theories. Interesting, but fairly general.

4. Citizen-led Development - the most interesting of the four courses - looking at development as opposed to Development and how citizen-led groups in poor countries (or the global South) are making a big difference for themselves.  Participation has been a buzzword in Development for the last 40 years or so and has taken on all kinds of faces.  It's based on the idea that Development needs to include the voice and knowledge of the people it's trying to develop.  By 2000, a book came out calling participation "the new tyranny" and all but called for stopping participatory approaches all together, claiming (with some merit) that participatory approaches were doing more harm than good, that they were simply another way of co-opting the poor into a Western-led project for macroeconomic development and market liberlization.  My paper looks at how one citizen-led group, SDI, overcomes a lot of these problems.

This has definitely been an eye-opening 3 months for me. And I'm convinced that Manchester is a great place to be studying this.  Lot's of current development thinking comes straight out of this university. I feel like I'm studying in the context of the really important debates that are on-going.  And, as I've alluded to in past posts, I feel like my ideas about what my own role in development could be are crystalizing. Like Kurt, I see, more than ever, the need for dramatic change in the rich countries in terms of social norms about energy consumption and also about global poverty. Something has to change and change soon.  But I'm also even more committed to the idea of working in development on the ground and trying to be an agent of change, perhaps more in the organizations that I work for than in the context of the people I might work with.

Jordan (Manchester)

Jordan's Skepticim: a brief history (Introduction Part 2)

Now I’m into the thick of my course/programme, trying to read as much as I can on topics range from climate change to structural analysis of conflict, to social movement theory, to the debates over how to measure poverty. This post is all about the skepticism side of the White Man’s Paradox, the realization that I/we can’t save the world and the question: where my skepticism has come from? So as I read for my courses, I’m trying to evaluate the effect on my skepticism. At the end of one of my lectures last week (for a module/course called ‘Citizen-led Development’) I remarked to a colleague: out of my four modules, this is only one where we hear about things that work. And the White Man is notably absent from the picture that is being drawing in the lectures.

This seems to confirm my skepticism. When I look at some of the things the World Bank has done, all of what I know about the IMF (International Monetary Fiend?), the philosophy of USAID, the mammoth, sluggish, cobbled UN, I despair. After reading a lot last week about the politics of climate change, I am now down to zero hope that a global consensus will ever be reached in time to make any difference. The conclusion that I came to in the essay I handed in on Friday is that the poor in the Global South may have to help themselves. The White Men will not agree to cut emissions soon enough, maybe never (I fully acknowledge that countries in the Global South have to cut back as well, though I have no more hope that they will agree any sooner). And the mantra of economic growth only leads to development practices that increase the vulnerability of the very poorest to global climate shocks. Growth, growth, growth. If cancer had a motto, that would be it.

But I digress. I’m supposed to be a critical-thinking professional and avoid taking cheap shots…

Unlike Kurtis, my skepticism has formed after I left Pakistan upon graduation from high school. Growing up, I watched my father and two other White doctors start up a small community health programme in North-Western Pakistan. The project focused primarily on education – helping villagers help themselves with basic sanitation and with pre- and post-natal health and safe home deliveries. The overheads were small, the project was local and most of the staff were from the area. In many respects the project was a success in small scale, sustainable poverty reduction and capacity building (a lecturer recently told us that, under no circumstances, should we use terms without defining them: I just used two – sustainable and capacity building. In retrospect, I still see projects like that, as a beacon of hope, that development (yet to be defined in this blog, I know) can work and that my education may be of some use to someone else.

So what am I, skeptical or hopeful about the prospects for development to work? Ask me tomorrow, and I might know.

Jordan (Manchester)