Poverty Alleviation at an International Development Organization: Resurrecting the Human Being as Subject

Abstract

This paper examines the field experiences of one of the authors in designing workshops for Finance Ministers of several countries at a leading international development organization. The power of a single book to cause a paradigm change is brought out as the authors sensemake the field experience in the light of their reading of The Development Dictionary, edited by Wolfgang Sachs, which debunks the myth of a “First World” and a “Third World” based on the socially constructed binary paradigm of “development” and “underdevelopment.” While claiming to do the opposite, professionals in the field of “international development” have often been impoverishing global communities through Western economic and technological interventions, enabled by the “aid” provided by interested global financial institutions on usurious, harmful, and coercive terms. It is ironic that the West, with all its economic crashes, corporate scandals, addictive consumerism, runaway militarism, and unsustainable life styles, considers itself competent to “develop” the other three-fourths of the world's population. A crucial shortcoming of disciplines like Western management, business administration, public policy, and development economics is that their conceptual frameworks and the ensuing strategies ignore the inner, subjective landscape of human beings that can be a source of creative transcendence from the standpoint of human flourishing. As a basis for an enlightened consciousness in global social change work, the paper recommends an alternative conceptual framework defined by the four coordinates of man-as-subject with a focus on the person (as opposed to man-as-object with a focus on aggregates), an abundance-based appreciative valuing (as opposed to a scarcity-based problem solving), organic, indigenous approaches that are grassroots-based (versus expert-driven prescriptions grafted from a foreign source) and an orientation toward Being (rather than a focus on “doing” that results in the mechanistic implementation of programmatic routines). The paper seeks to highlight the importance of resurrecting human subjectivity as a fundamental regenerative force underlying empowerment and poverty alleviation. The answer to the world's problems may be ‘counter-development,’ by which the ‘rich’ ‘developed’ countries “develop” themselves in their spiritual consciousness, thereby reducing the systemic risk of their unsustainable, wasteful ways on the rest of the world they seek to ‘develop.’ If we think of the world as a global learning community, a repository of different ways of living and being that are non-comparable, we may have to remake these contemporary development institutions more in the image of a ‘global parliament of cultures’ in which different cultures, from a stance of equality, share life furthering practices with one another and seek to understand what gives vitality to all of them. As experiences of urban poor groups illustrate, the poor have demonstrated extraordinary creativity and ingenuity in designing innovative solutions to their own problems, and they appear more competent at poverty reduction than local or national governments and international agencies (Appadurai, 2001). Poverty alleviation led by the poor themselves may be a viable alternative to poverty alleviation led by the rich. International development agencies from wealthy countries that claim to be focused on “poverty alleviation” should perhaps reframe their mission to “greed alleviation” in their own countries.