A great global effort is underway to alleviate poverty. From the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations to the World Bank's efforts to recreate itself as a "kinder and gentler" institution to various campaigns such as Make Poverty History, a global regime of poverty policies is taking shape. This project will study the global poverty agenda with an emphasis on three research questions: 1) What and why are the dominant ideas of poverty alleviation? How do these forms of expertise reproduce or alter global geographies of power? 2) Does the new paradigm of development constitute a break with previous models of development? How does the framework of poverty alleviation deal with markets, capitalism, and wealth accumulation? 3) How does the new global order of poverty management maintain or reconfigure geopolitics, notably the relationship between development institutions, which are mainly based in America, and developing countries? The project uses a case-study methodology, focusing on the microcredit sector, one of the most popular poverty alleviation and gender empowerment policies now in vogue across the world. In order to investigate this global sector, the project uses "global policy chain analysis," i.e. an analysis of how knowledge and practices produced in the development institutions of Washington D.C. are rendered authoritative and disseminated globally through transactions of aid. The project grounds these circulations and transactions in three primary geographical sites: Washington D.C. as a node of development capital and power; Bangladesh, from where the microcredit idea originated and which is now home to massive non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that challenge the ideas produced in Washington D.C.; and strategic Middle East countries like Egypt and Lebanon where, after 9-11, the US is expending considerable development resources in order to ensure integration of the region's poor into the global economy. Using interviews, panel study, non-participant observation, archival research, institutional histories and policy analysis, the project will demonstrate how the global poverty agenda is established as well as contested. In doing so, it will study globalization through the unique lens of "development capital" the circuits of accumulation that run through international development institutions such as the World Bank, NGOs, foundations, lobbying groups, consulting firms, corporate philanthropy.
The project will have broader impacts that relate to the public debate about the global poverty agenda. At a time when there are calls for an end to poverty, the project analyzes the battle of ideas over poverty-alleviation and indicates the strengths and limitations of different models of poverty-alleviation. In addition, while the project is a study of geographies of power, it also brings to light the spaces of negotiability that exist within the apparatus of development. Such issues are of urgent importance to practice-oriented communities such as global advocacy groups, policymakers, and agenda-setting foundations. Such issues are also of significance in the teaching of globalization and development, in training a new generation of global citizens, and in inspiring them to engage with powerful institutions.
