Politics of global social relations: organising ‘everyday lived experiences’ of development and destitution

Abstract

This article offers a political analysis of development and poverty reduction initiatives from a social-relational perspective. More specifically, the author draws on the example of microfinance schemes to illustrate the way in which poverty reduction policy is increasingly advanced in response to social resistance to experiences of destitution, which is itself produced through development. The perspective the author advances disrupts conventional framings of development and poverty in terms of independent domains abstracted from social relations of power and resistances. Furthermore, it brings into view the global dimension of these social relations, articulated and co-constituted through a range of actors across different levels of governance. Through the social-relational lens, the development paradox is also revealed: development processes have produced destitution which, in turn, becomes the target of poverty reduction (‘development’) initiatives, which are themselves yet again premised upon either realising economic growth or maintaining, at a fundamental level, social relations of inequality and dispossession. This paradox is neither explicable nor discernable from orthodox conceptions of the international political economy of development.