Global Issues and Discourses References Revision

Du Toit, 2004

• In Ceres in Western Cape there are links between the livelihood operations of poor people, global integration, agro-food restructuring and the modernisation of paternalistic farming styles; the disadvantages caused by these processes are better captured by the notion of adverse incorporation to broader economic and social networks than social exclusion

• Ceres is a central of the deciduous fruit export industry where abundant resources should guarantee an adequate quality of life for those residing in the area; however, large portions of the population live in poor conditions and work for low wages, a paradox often attributed to a lack of appropriate organisation and the perceived deviance of the poor

• Attempts to tackle poverty are problematic as they ignore the views of those actually in poverty, but when explored it seems this low quality of life has been formed through the legacy of colonialism, modernising legal reforms and pressures placed in food production by globalisation

• This challenges mainstream discourses that it is social exclusion that is the main cause of poverty, but instead recentres debate to consider adverse incorporation whereby the poor become integrated into networks that marginalise them and the systematic dynamics of inequality, impoverishment and conflict at play

• This shows that integration and incorporation are not necessarily empowering, instead research and policy solutions should seek to engage with, challenge and enlarge the space for poor people’s agency

Leichenko & Silva, 2014

• Poverty is widely understood to be a key factor in increasing the risk of individuals and households to be harmed by climatic shocks and stresses, climate change is never seen as the cause of poverty but there are channels through which it may change and exacerbate it particularly in less developed countries through complex, multifaceted and context-specific processes

• Climate vulnerabilities, impacts and responses are deeply entangled within political, social and economic processes that create and perpetuate poverty; this is diverse in its impacts and often involves patterns of social exclusion 

• Poverty is a key factor in increasing vulnerability to climate change based on an ‘exposure’ component and a ‘social’ component; the poor have fewer assets to help them recover from shocks, their livelihoods are more likely to depend on climate sensitive sectors, they are likely to live in areas with high exposure, less likely to be insured and have less access to knowledge on adaptation

• Physical and psychological dimensions also shape vulnerability as the poor experience higher levels of illness, mental stress, shame, humiliation etc. that contribute to worse financial decision making and hinder their ability to escape poverty; lack of land ownership, options for livelihood diversification, lack of market access, degradation of resources, social isolation weak governance and inadequate infrastructure also increase vulnerability 

• Climate change also impacts poverty through food prices as changing conditions may affect agricultural productivity and therefore prices, this impacts the poor as they spend much of their income on food; for agricultural producers this also leads to a loss of income

• There are further indirect effects through an increased likelihood of extreme weather events affecting resource-based livelihoods, impacts to ecosystems, political instability, conflict, migration and slowed economic growth which can impact poverty rates and alleviation efforts

• Poverty alleviation is one of the most important strategies in reducing the impacts of climate change; however this is threatened by climate and must have strong governance of political and economic systems to uphold

Harriss-White, 2005

• Destitution is the most extreme form of poverty, the destitute are often considered ‘nonpeople’ and expelled from the state, market and civil society; this should be overcome by granting citizenship to the destitute and recognising them in the eyes of political elites

• The destitute are often referred to as ‘scavengers’ ‘asset-less’ etc., they are actively deprived of a voice and have nothing as they lose labour through forced unemployment, lose control and lose insurance mechanisms making them very vulnerable to accidents, illness and further economic shocks; this is conceived as an individual process

• This is not only an outcome of market change but also a lack of enfranchisement governed by perceived deviance from social norms such as cleanliness and health; this exclusion can be forcible from physical spaces but also moral as they are excluded from work, social protection and citizenship

• There are laws used to regulate destitution that have the effect of exacerbating and criminalising it e.g. in India vagrancy and beggary are crimes that can be prosecuted and people become forced into homelessness

• Lack of addresses disintitles people from identity cards, food security, social protection and are denied being a member of society; they must rely on solidarity and agency to survive

• The political system is limited in responding to destitution as the benefits system is not accessible without an address and is characterised by harsh eligibility based on stigma and social expulsion; there is a need for activist and collectivist responses to basic needs and to regrant agency and voices to the destitute as they currently rely on their own heavily constrained forms of agency to survive

Thomas et al., 2018

• The varied effects of recent extreme weather events around the world have exemplified the uneven impacts of climate change upon populations resulting from a range of social, economic, historical and political factors operating at multiple scales; this unequal exposure can be analysed through access to resources, governance, culture and knowledge to draw attention to the root cause of climate change threats

• Often scientific and technical approaches dominate studies of climate change vulnerability to leave underlying social drivers largely unaddressed, by understanding vulnerability as a multidimensional process on many scales positive interventions can be formed to reduce harm and mortality in socially vulnerable groups, minimise their exposure and sensitivity

• Access to resources, or the ability to derive benefits from resources, influences vulnerability by augmenting exposure, adaptive capacity etc. and can influence capital, assets, warning systems, housing, food, communication etc.

• The poorest suffer the greatest losses from climate-related disasters as there is a lack of economic, institutional or political capacities to respond or prepare 

• Vulnerability among poor households reflects limited wealth to prepare for climate impacts and limited institutional capacity to ensure disaster preparation exists in a form that is useful e.g. early warning and evacuation systems in response to flood and cyclones in Bangladesh were not useful in Dhaka’s informal settlements as households could not be notified due to their lack of legal title

• The built environment also plays a role as the poor tend to reside in less resistant housing, may live in poorly constructed buildings on floodplains or unstable hillslides making them vulnerable; this is linked to social power and gendered, racialised and classist regimes

• In order to successfully improve the vulnerability of the poor to climate change there should be stable partnerships between governments, social movements and organisations and effective engagements with the complex effects of climate change

Hickey & Bracking, 2005

• Chronic poverty is an inherently political problem and its persistence reflects institutionalisation of political norms, legitimisation within political discourse and the failure of the poorest groups to gain political representation as those who live in poverty are the least likely to be able to gain political representation and benefit from economic growth

• Representation is key to the politics of chronic poverty as the poor are most lacking in assets to exercise a political voice, direct participation may be seen as risky and time consuming 

• To move towards democratisation, good governance and human rights there has been an increased political space in which citizens can organise and seek representation to open up voices for the poor; there should also be a turn towards understanding the motives and capacities of actors who speak for others

• Political arenas are made up of norms, ideas and moral values shaped by how political discourses frame issues of poverty to create categories of the deserving and undeserving poor; these are produced from power relations that embed chronic poverty and should be depoliticised to move action away from a bias towards the ‘productive’ and ‘deserving’ poor rather than the poorest left with no protective measures; this was seen in Ugandan poetry reduction policies biased towards the ‘economically active’ poor 

• There is no singular form of representation that can best secure voice for the chronically poor but coalitions between different socio-economic actors are useful; there should be a focus on fairness, redistribution and justice that would allow for the active rejection of categorisations of the poor

Carter, 2008

• Poverty is most frequently measured and analysed in terms of income flows, streams of consumption and expenditures in ways that permit the calculation of indicators but do not reveal much about who the poor are, why they are poor or whether their situation is likely to change

• Information on the assets that underlie and generate income can help answer these questions and provide more comprehensive pictures of who the poor are and provide insights into the nature of pathways from poverty; this can also help develop durable antipoverty politics

• These asset based approaches were developed in the 1980s, and led to the development of relational approaches in the 1990s to expand the initial rejection of poverty as an individual condition and become more attentive to the systems of power, exclusion and social stigma at work in societies, nations and at the global scale

Bhambra, 2021

• There is a need for a historically informed, global analysis of inequality but this must be careful of reproducing a Eurocentral approach and instead being attentive to regimes of enslavement and colonialism that continue to have a lasting legacy in contemporary configurations of global inequality 

• Relationships between the coloniser and the colonised are significant in the production and reproduction of inequalities between countries and within them, without understanding these global colonial entanglements, it is not possible to put forward a credible future alternative to current inequalities

• The focus should remain on inequalities produced through colonialism, reparations for slavery, trade relations and coerced labour on colonial plantations

• The power of the modern state should not only be understood in terms of the exercise of power within a national territory, but instead it must be examined how European states extend their violence into other territories and other populations e.g. the colonial drain imposed in India from Britain draining a total of $45 trillion from Indian until the beginning of WW2, this sees India’s poverty connected to the process that made Britain wealthy 

• By only comparing nations in the present and assessing inequalities as a consequence of internal regimes is to misunderstand the processes that have generated global inequality, this should be a historical and transnational project of understanding ‘connected histories’ to form a postcolonial sociology that seeks to understand and address historic inequalities through a commitment to global redistributive justice

Crane et al., 2020

• Impoverishment is seen as a relation, an outcome of intersecting political projects of racialised oppression, political-economic injustice and socio-legal control with processes such as bordering, migrant illegality, racial capitalism and caring community politics intersecting with poverty politics today in a relationality that is key to understanding how poverty is produced and resisted

• Poverty can be re-politicised by critiquing normative liberal orders of poverty governance and by understanding that impoverishment is produced in and through the operation of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, racist property relations and instruments of Whiteness; this has been depoliticised though technical and oppressive forms of poverty governance 

• Racial capitalism and its forms of violent categorisation devalue many social lives through ongoing colonialism including Indigenous life, lands and livelihoods in a constant effort to enact racial banishment and create categorisations designating some as illegal and deportable and framing some as undeserving in a way that is often racialised 

• There should be attention paid to how racial capitalism has secured particular social, political and economic arrangements through aggressive policies, racial banishment and humiliation of those experiencing poverty; however the poor begin to challenge this by articulating radical ideas and solidarities through creative forms of survival and activism

• Racial banishment theorises the criminalisation and removal of urban residents, eviction, gentrification etc. that is foundational to securing Western supremacy in many different public and urban environments through pervasive anti-black processes to reproduce an aggressively white social order

• Everyday brilliance allows for embodied and everyday practices of possibility to challenge oppression through unthinkable politics on new horizons

Friend & Moench, 2015

• Urbanisation transforms socio-ecological systems in locations that are hazardous to exacerbate future climate risks in locations such as Asia and the Global South; this brings new dependence on complex infrastructures, technologies and institutional systems to create new drivers of poverty in urban areas that raise questions over what an urban future looks like and who can benefit

• Where poverty issues appear in urban climate resilience it is often in terms of reducing vulnerability of the poor to climate shocks and crises, but there is also a need to better address the structural causes of poverty and reshape urban systems to recognise the concept of rights, wellbeing and transformations of the political economy

• Urbanisation will be a critical arena in which the struggle to avoid climate change impacts play out as urban climate change will likely involve shocks on urban populations and economic assets

• In order to achieve resilience, there should be a consideration of what urban systems should look like, for whose benefit they should be shaped and by whom

Stanziani, 2017

• Inequality has been extended to integrate historical dynamics, economic analysis and public policy to highlight impacts on social balance and economic growth; this should involve attention to scales of inequality and how it plays out in different contexts around the world

• The nation must be questioned as a relevant unit for discussing inequality as it was not the nation, but rather the region, country, municipality and empire that played a central role in the relation between tax, inequality and economic growth e.g. the high levels of poverty in Asia and Africa are put down to the application of non-Western economic structures yet this is more likely resultant from colonialism 

• The importance of empire over the long term is important and this does not end when the empire falls and nation states arise, when empires collapsed, colonisers sought to maintain economic influence over colonies in terms of prices, taxation and traditional conditions

Carter & Barrett, 2006

• An asset-based approach to poverty makes it possible to distinguish deep rooted, persistent structural poverty from that which passes naturally with time due to systematic growth 

• This can identify poverty traps and long-term persistent poverty as well as contributing to persistent poverty reduction strategies

Said, 1979

• Edward Said’s theory is discourse is useful in applications to governance that upholds poverty as it reveals how social elites and government officials have produced and embedded narratives to legitimise the banishment of the poorest in society

United Nations, 2025

• In 2025 the UN estimated that globally 808 million people were living in extreme poverty, equating to 9.9% of the world’s population

• This sees 1 in 10 people’s lives defined by a struggle to survive in a state of economic uncertainty, only exacerbated by the impacts of climate shocks, pandemics and fiscal instabilities

• The magnitude of this figure and the reality that in some nations extreme poverty continues to rise demands a deeper analysis of the condition

Barrientos, 2011

• Since 2000 social protection has emerged as a key policy framework to address poverty and vulnerability in developing countries with international organisations and national governments escalating the number and coverage of social protection programmes they support

• Social protection is associated with a range of public institutions, norms and programmes aimed at protecting workers and households from threats to basic living standards through social insurance, social assistance and labour market regulation; this attempts to reduce poverty and provide support to the poorest including strengthening their agency 

• This attempts to address poverty as multidimensional and vulnerability as temporal as it measures the probability that individuals, households or communities will fall into poverty in the future by maintaining basic levels of consumption and access to services through income transfers, cash transfers and poverty reduction programmes that can be conditional 

• There are issues in expanding social protection in developing countries including financing, capacity constraints and measuring/providing objectives for expenditure; these may be helped by international aid

Ballard, 2012

• Since the mid-1990s a number of governments in the global South have instituted programmes to provide regular cash grants to poor people to reduce poverty, allow children to be educated and vaccinated, and the poor to gain access to employment and a regular income; these place an emphasis on liberalised economic growth and biopolitical inventions for the poor

• Cash transfers emerge as an instrument for encouraging the development of the poor by attempting to increase their entrepreneurial power to reorient the poor to take responsibility for their own development in a form of politics

• These transfers often attach conditions to force recipients to ‘earn’ their grant by keeping children in school, having them vaccinated, improving their education, health and civic responsibility to allow populations to advance themselves in the long term; this works as a form of governmentality enabling authorities to shape the conduct of the poor by placing expectations on poor households that they will find routes out of poverty by making good choices leading them to becoming more capable of earning income

• Although social protection has led to income inequality falling, poverty falling, household consumption improving alongside school attendance and nutrition; there may be issues as the outcomes of liberal paternalism see schools and health services overcrowded and understaffed due to a lack of budgets for services

• Grant conditions may also undermine gender empowerment as they affirm traditional divisions of labour and responsibility such as motherhood as women have to jump through hoops to access benefits in ways that essentialise gendered roles of caring 

• This sees a passive revolution take place where top-down responses seek to attend to bottom-up demands so existing elites can manage the inclusion of marginalised groups rather than lose control, this undermines the political influence of the poor and instead see cash transfers become a site of biopolitical struggle

Alinsunurin, 2021

• Conditional cash transfers are seen as a form of governmentality that can produce gendered social practices within households to impact women’s position in the home and the community in line with patriarchal ideas, this undermines gendered empowerment 

• As the government becomes a lived and embodied experience through CCTs there are gendered effects on the division of labour and order in the household in the private sphere as outcomes related to education and health are often seen as a reflection of responsible motherhood seeing women’s identities reconstructed through their role in the household related to programme conditions

• Conditional cash transfers were expanded in the Philippines under the 4Ps in 2008 and by 2018 around 4.5 million households benefited from attempts to break intergenerational poverty through the provision of cash contingent on health and education monitored for compliance

• There is an uneven burden on women to maintain their participation in the programme as they attempt to send their children to school and receive grants, but to do so must take on extra responsibilities such as attending the FDS with 1/2 hours of training per month on subjects such as governing household finances, responsible parenting, health and hygiene etc.; the women were keen to take on these behaviours with the belief it would help them and their households achieve their aims, as well as being responsible for policing the actions of their family members such as husbands drinking 

• There is a technology of responsibilisation as mothers were expected to support their children’s education and health through taking on extra domestic work in the household with little help from their husbands

Garmany, 2016

• In NE Brazil there lies one of the world’s largest territorial disputes, yet one of the key concerns here is around the difficulty in administering Bolsa Familia conditional cash transfers in the politically and geographically ambiguous region; the application of this has stark led to political geographic changes in Ponta Fina as a result of state presence

• There is a form of governmentality operating through the PBF card as individuals must come in person to local bank branches each month to pick up their allowance, this sees bodies pinned down at certain times and in certain locations, presenting themselves to state apparatus and with behaviours induced by the scheme leading to a more compliant and productive society; residents also see changes in behaviour such as health checkups, pre and post natal counselling, access to prescriptions and children attending school

• However, there are limits in accessing resources and establishing links for the government due to the border dispute bouncing residents back and forth between municipal services and spending to local governments not being spent on intended purposes due to political corruption with the result of poorly delivered public works projects and feelings of state neglect; here CCT is undermined by state actors and the day to day practices of CCT recipients and administrators

• PBF has led to geographic change in the Porta Fina area such as grown in the formal economy in towns with local bank branches, growth in profits for formal grocery store owners, tactics to expand territories, migration and transportation networks seeing an intensification of the neoliberal state in controlling and regulating space and activities

• Yet CCTs may not always produce what they aimed to accomplish as populations fail to reproduce neoliberal ideologies in predictable ways; in Porta Fina employment in low paying jobs has fallen due to the poor being less willing to work certain jobs than they might have been when desperate and experiencing extreme poverty; others reduce their time in waged labour to spend more time in informal work such as farming, care giving, constructing and teaching as they perceived these to have more importance to the community and bolster their social prospects further than neoliberal discourses of profit maximisation and improvement in the formal economy

• Residents now have more control over their labour due to no longer being in extreme poverty, using PBF to distance themselves from neoliberal policies and practices to favour subsistence over private ownership and employment upward mobility 

• There is also a rise in alternative economies in Ponta Fina as residents exchange debit card benefits into more desirable commodities in informal markets, as well as a rise in non-capitalist exchange and informal production to show the contradictory outcomes of CCTs

Hickey, 2009

• There is a need within international development to integrate a stronger political perspective into protecting the poorest, yet this engagement with the politics that promote poverty remains limited within the agenda of liberalism and international development agencies, there remains a focus on ideology rather than evidence 

• The examination of successful social protection suggests political modes preferred deeply political processes such as re-embedding capitalism and extending social contracts to marginal groups; deeper forms of political economy and political geography are required to capture the politics of reaching the poorest groups and extending the social contract between states and citizens

• International development agencies such as the World Bank continually adopt technocratic and universalising ways to engage with poor countries that obscure the essentially political character of many development problems and the local and national political processes leading to uneven development, there is a need to take poverty and politics seriously as part of a broader shift from narrow neoliberalism focused development thinking and practices

• Such agencies understand pro-poor politics within an idealised view of how politics works in poor countries based on Western claims to universal knowledge; this continues expert-led depoliticising tendencies in addressing poverty 

• There is a need to better engagement with political realities in the developing world and work away from ‘protecting’ the poor to empowering them as citizens with rights

Siddiqi, 2017

• The Pakistani state has made significant advances in formalising and universaling citizenship through the digitisation of citizenship numbers, this was used to reach out to citizens in the aftermath of large-scale flooding in 2010/11 with a universal cash transfer programme instituted for disaster-affected households using citizenship numbers to identify and provide ATM cards to those in the worst affected regions

• This formed a political space for novel interactions between the state and citizens to form a new ‘disaster citizenship’ in the region through progressive disaster response policy through the critical ID regime

• Disasters are perceived as tipping points for political change, but more often lead to unrest than peace; however, after flooding in Pakistan the state framed disaster relief as a moral obligation and linked the response directly to ID cards which people understood as defining features of their citizenship; this transfer was progressive, universal and direct to help people and state officials construct this as a right of citizenship

• The wider political climate here resulted in people demanding more of the newly democratic state that had reached out in an unprecedented way to citizens; a new state-citizen relation was formed in a country historically seen to be doing little to foster bonds of citizenship among its people

• This illustrated a shift to a more rights based citizenship linked to the widespread coverage of citizenship numbers through ID documents, this may extend rights beyond Pakistan to other temporal and spatial scales; the Pakistani people were able to assert and form a new citizenship through social protection policy