2.2. PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS ON POVERTY AND ITS CAUSES
2.2.4. Tracing a New Poverty Alleviation Paradigm
Development theory in the first decade of the 21st century has been largely fragmented, from Gore‟s detection of a southern development consensus to the United Nations sustainable development approach (See Gore, 2002). In this theoretical fragmentation, however, there is an emerging regional clustering, slightly different form of Gores (2000) Southern Consensus but nevertheless, a convergence of global south emerging economies such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) bloc. Russell (2010) notes the re-cycling of dependency theories, and thus an emerging re-tasking of the state to intervene in creating
39 development possibilities. Russell (2010) also sees a new theoretical bud which focuses on equalizing development processes and not necessarily outcomes.
The above said, more innovative theoretical efforts are required to resolve new development challenges which characterise the 21st century. One of the potentially effective theory is the emerging intergenerational poverty school, with scattered labelling of this school as a paradigm (see Saith and Wazir, 2010). A simple Google search of the phrase
„intergenerational poverty‟ yields hundreds of academic papers, articles as well as posts on the subject. To a limited extent, this might suggest an increasing popularity of the subject.
Consisting of universities, research institutes and Non-government Organizations, the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC) is a leading architect of this emerging school.
Two schools of thought are traceable in intergenerational poverty literature. On the one hand is the deterministic life cycle position (see Ham et al., 2012) which considers IGP as „given‟
while on the other hand is the life course theory which Clark and Dieleman (1996) explain as the individualised experience of the sequence of life events. –or what Dykstra & van Wissen, (1999) refer to as unique personal biographies. The Life course theory further holds that life sequence can be summarised into for major courses namely (i) household (ii) labor force (iii) education and (iv) housing, all of which influence residential mobility of individuals.
Concurring with the Life Course theory, on her part, Keister (2007) sees adult wealth ownership as a consequence of behaviours learnt from a young age, concerning fertility, the timings and ordering of marriage, educational aspirations; job related outcomes as well as saving habits. Although Keister locates her argument within religion and wealth discourse, she does point out that these behaviors are learned from families. After all, religion orientations and practices have their base within households. For Piketty (2014), wealth ownership goes beyond acquisition to bequeathing. Infact, Piketty (2014) argues that inherited wealth produces a specific and different form of capitalism from wealth acquired through hard work. Piketty (2014) also notes that inherited wealth might be more productive in terms of returns than wealth acquired through labor. Although Vakmin (2014:4) dismisses Piketty‟s thesis, concluding that “such claims have more to do with seething envy than with scholarly erudition”, Piketty‟s work opens an important discussion, of which the emerging school need to do further deconstruction. Vakmin (2014) would do well to clarify how seething envy applies to an otherwise important line of inquiry.
40 It is unclear which should be examined
Considering its strengths, the IGP School is empirical, and therefore less ideological like its predecessors such as the dependency theories or the Washington consensus (See Theptonio, 1971; Hatton-Yeo and Watkins, 2004). This evidence based character provides a better possibility of achieving meaningful development (Bird and Higgins, 2011).
Any meaningful rendition of intergenerational poverty can only be made if the broader context of intergenerational transmissions of socio-economic, cultural or even religious factors is kept in perspective. Transmission of socio-economic factors functions in a profoundly complex scheme than transmission of biological factors (Bird and Bird, 2009).
This is because socio-economic factors are formed and transmitted within profoundly interactive endogenous and exogenous topographies. Second, this position is interested in the expanse and depth of poverty, and less interested in geo-politics of poverty, a salient factor in previous paradigms (Bird and Higgins, 2011). Third, the IGP school is holistic, and covers management of economic, social as well as environmental capitals, and effectively transmitting these capitals for future generations benefit whether in developed or developing countries (Bird and Bird, 2009; Bird and Higgins, 2011; Hatton-Yeo and Watkins, 2004).
Stated differently, this philosophy is not a developing country diagnosis, and, it interested in long range interventions wherever poverty is found. Fourth, it allocates duties to the state and the markets alike, and by so doing it conciliates the otherwise dichotomous tendencies of previous development theories.
On the weaknesses, the IGP paradigm fails to prescribe solid recommendations on how intergenerational poverty could be terminated (See for example Hatton-Yeo and Watkins, 2004; Bird and Bird (2009) Bird and Higgins, (2011). It is more interested in finding how intergenerational poverty takes place, more than how it could be terminated or prevented.
Second, while the lack of political framework does suggest legitimacy, it is also a fault line in that globalizing the IGP agenda requires political channels. There is no clear political champion for this school. Third, IGP is essentially a quantitative enterprise, with negligible qualitative traces. This is a significant disadvantage on the part of developing countries, which either do not have the resources to address IGP, or the data, or both. The implication is that, unfortunately, developing countries will be forced to rely on developed countries for
41 support and assistance, in spite of the criticisms around the dependency nature of the relationship between developed and developing countries. Fourth, the discourse might be taking a wrong turn by the dominant usage of the term intergenerational poverty rather than intergenerational development. Intergenerational development might yield different results, especially because it moves beyond diagnosis of poverty as intergenerational, to intergenerational creation and distribution of wealth. Intergenerational development should be conceptualised on a broader sense than Hatton-Yeo and Watkins (2004), who use the term in reference to existing although different generations (thus they talk of ensuring that the young and the old are considered as development beneficiaries.
Clearly, therefore, more than a decade after the impasse declaration, intergenerational development has been theorised in disproportionately limited sense, compared to the defences and re-inventions of neo-classical Meta theory. This thesis exhorts development economists to move intergenerational development from its shadows to the mainstream, as an alternative paradigm in development literature. To conceptualise development outside inter-generational milieu is to descend into the same theoretical chasm where development theories for the past half century mainly abide.
What is more, when considering future generations, literature and practice alike, have tended to focus on transmission of poverty, and not necessarily transmission of poverty traps. These two, the study argues, are different. Transmission of poverty traps refers to bequeathing of deep structures such as illiteracy, poor health, poor social development and the like (see for example Bird and Bird, 2009; Rose and Dyer, 2006). To be fair, there are more attempts to understand how these traps relate to intergenerational poverty (See Hojermark, 2007;
Patterson, 2000; Moore, 2005; Moore, 2001), except that often these efforts do not seek an understanding of how these traps occur, under what conditions and the kinds of forces which shape their intergenerational resilience.
Also, importantly, intergenerational development should not be treated from a mere
„imagining‟, rather from a planning point of view. This resonates with the findings of this study, that poverty in South Africa, as it is in many other parts of the world is intergenerational. So should be development. South Africa‟s (and global) development policy debates needs to go beyond pro-poor and pro-market, and give way to intergenerational approaches.
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