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This book is based on a three-year international comparative study on poverty reduction and sustainability strategies . It provides evidence from twenty case studies around the world on the power and potential of community and higher education based scholars and activists working together in the co-creation of transformative knowledge. Opening with a theoretical overview of knowledge, democracy and action, the book is followed by analytical chapters providing lessons learned and capacity building, and on the theory and practice of community university research partnerships. It also includes lessons on models of evaluation, approaches to measuring the impact and an agenda for future research and policy recommendations. The book overviews the concept of engaged scholarship and then moves to focus on community-university research partnerships. It is based on a global empirical study of the role of community-university research partnerships within the context of poverty alleviation, the creation of sustainable societies and, broadly speaking, the Millennium Development Goals. The book frames the contribution of community-university research partnerships within a larger knowledge democracy framework, linking this practice to other spaces of knowledge democracy. These include the open access movement, new acceptance of the methods of community-based and participatory research and the call for cognitive justice or the need for epistemologies of the Global South. It takes a particular look at the variety of structures that have been created in the various universities and civil society research organizations to facilitate and enhance research partnerships.
recommendations such as changing attitudes and beliefs and ‘breaking the culture of silence on GBV’; investing in GBV service delivery and improving care for GBV survivors; poverty reduction strategies; engaging men and boys; and fostering coordination between community leaders and other key figures such as teachers, and more ( Huser, 2018 ; Oxfam, 2017 ; Bérenger and Verdier-Chouchane, 2016 ). Results or evidence of impact are, however, limited. The complexity of child marriage makes programming and evaluation of such programming extremely challenging, especially in a
13 The co-operative identity : good for poverty reduction? and poverty reduction Rowshan Hannan Introduction As discussions crystallise on the ways in which co-operatives reduce poverty, an important question emerges as to whether this is their purpose.1 Indeed, the definition of co-operatives emphasised by global bodies, such as the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) and the International Labour Organization (ILO), recognises their identity as enterprises that provide economic opportunities for members rather than referring to any role in reducing
release of the Commission’s public consultation revealed that its philosophical position on social Europe for Europe 2020 was identical to that of Lisbon II: progress in social exclusion and poverty reduction was to follow from success in economic growth and job creation (Commission, 2009a: 7). However, this had clearly changed by the time the first draft proposal of Europe 2020 was released on 3 March 2010, since it included the headline target to reduce poverty within the EU by 25 per cent (i.e. 20 million individuals) by 2020 – the first EU quantitative target in the
waiting for work for more than two weeks to unemployment benefits. In 2011–12 in the fieldwork state of Karnataka, 100 days of NREGS work would have provided each household with Rs. 12,500, or 23 per cent of the poverty-line income for a family of five.1 The implications of this are considerable, and particularly so in Karnataka, which has seen its rate of poverty reduction fall behind almost all other states (see Table 1.3), and where NREGS has been shown to be performing relatively poorly up until this point (Usami and Rawal 2012).2 As NREGS is one of India’s largest
2013a, 2013b), fieldwork in rural North Karnataka a year later (in 2014) showed that significant subversion of such programmes remained widespread. Rather than accumulation by dispossession and headline-grabbing mining and real estate ‘scams’, this chapter is concerned with the more mundane everyday workings of the state at local level and how they are linked to class relations and the less dramatic process of accumulation by exploitation. It discusses in detail how dominant class men at village level shape government poverty reduction programmes for their own
When Robert McNamara was appointed to head the World Bank, he left behind the disastrous Vietnam War, which he had vigorously prosecuted for LBJ. This departure from the Johnson Administration enabled him to rehabilitate his reputation by leading a crusade to eradicate extreme poverty around the world.
When he took over the bank in 1968, it had achieved little and its credibility suffered as the US exerted undue political influence over the bank to support its foreign policy.
McNamara revived the fortunes of the World Bank by attracting funding from outside Washington and Wall Street, thereby reducing US influence and increasing funding to poverty reduction programmes.
Sadly, his campaign was disrupted by the oil crises of the 1970s. As Third World debt soared, McNamara adopted a new strategy of structural adjustment loans. These loans encouraged developing countries to deregulate their economies, privatise state-owned enterprises and phase out subsidies on fuel, food and health. Such policies evolved into the Washington Consensus, a set of uncompromising neoliberal policies, which were enthusiastically pursued by his successors.
labour, forms of class-based domination were more pronounced, poverty levels were at their highest and government poverty reduction programmes were subverted to the greatest extent. In villages that were closer to urban labour markets, the dominant class made greater use of its control over the distribution of public resources through local government institutions to reproduce its position. State mediations of class relations tended to maintain or strengthen the position of the dominant class. Decentralisation had increased the role played by local government
human well-being as a manifestation of human freedom’ and that most non-democratic states performed badly in terms of economic growth and poverty reduction (World Bank, 2000: 112–13). Donor states, on the other hand, were more overt in maintaining democratic conditions as a key element of the new political conditionality, however uneven the practice (see Baylies, 1995; Olsen, 1998). Overall, therefore, the early 1990s further broadened the extent to which aid would be conditional upon ‘internal’ actions and policies of recipient states. Alongside the existing demand
the analysis. The second question concerns the JMS’s forms of organisation. These have taken three predominant forms: conscientisation, mobilisation and NGO-related livelihood diversification. It is argued here that the last of the three is problematic with regard to the broader goals of movements of the labouring class. JMS mobilisation has focused on gender- and caste-based forms of violence and discrimination, and, increasingly, on improving access to government poverty reduction programmes – most notably the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS