Blair, Brown and the Gleneagles agenda: making poverty history, or confronting the global politics of unequal development?

Abstract

In a series of speeches, statements and interviews in early 2005 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown set out an ambitious agenda of global development change for the UK's Presidency of the G8. The Gleneagles summit, held in July of that year, did make a number of significant policy commitments in the areas of trade, finance and the environment. But, with the passage of time and as the details were worked out, many of these turned out to be much less far-reaching than the claims initially made by the two politicians. The Gleneagles agenda could never, in fact, have worked to ‘make poverty history’, because such an achievement was simply not within the compass of the G8 to deliver. The global politics of development is not animated by what the ‘North’ is or is not willing to do for the ‘South’. It is instead worked out within the context of a global politics of unequal development that neither Blair nor Brown appear to comprehend.