THE NEOLIBERAL DEVELOPMENT AGENDA

OR THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN REVISITED

André Mommen

Paper presented to
Transforma #5
5th Transdisciplinary Forum Magdeburg

"Moving (Con)Texts. Production and Circulation of Ideas in the Global Knowledge

Economy"

Otto-von-Guericke-University,
Magdeburg
July 10-12, 2009

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Introduction

In this article the impact of neoliberal development ideologies will be discussed in relation to
the role of the NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) and the setting of the development
agenda. Since the 1990s, NGOs and development ideologues have joined hands by focusing
on market liberalization via accelerated privatization, deregulation and trade liberalization.
All versions of today’s development strategies are now advocating a process of accelerated
integration of capital, production and markets globally driven by the logic of corporate
profitability in order to prop economic growth in combination with poverty reduction
programs, democratic reforms and emancipation schemes.

In the eyes of the neoliberals, the triumph of democracy and markets over authoritarianism
and statist economies was combined with efforts to promote open economies and open
policies stressing the necessity of thoroughgoing economic reforms supporting export-led
industrialization (ELI) and free trade. Many countries that failed to reform were compelled by
the Bretton Woods institutions to conform to Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs). In the
wake of this process in which import-substituting industrialization (ISI) and the development
state had disappeared, many countries were unable to transform their economies or to reach a
higher degree of economic development. Especially African economies were the major
victims of trade liberalization and privatizations. Their financial crisis was so deep and their
debt burden so heavy, that they could not alter the economic framework in which production
took place.(1) Around 1995 a steep economic crisis generating poverty and social instability
gained many developing countries. It was in this period that the role of NGOs could gain
prominence by taking over entire essential state sectors (education, health care), while the
international institutions had to redefine the neoliberal development goals and methods.
Small-scale development projects, micro-finance, bottom-up initiatives, institutional reforms,
people’s participation, women’s rights, etc. became goals NGOs of all sorts were working on.
Ambitious platforms for worldwide action were regularly setting forward humanistic
development goals that were never reached.(2) They only created goodwill for easier fund
raising. The platforms excluded deliberately liberalization movements as agents of political,
social and economic change and included proposals for market reforms, property rights and
ELI strategies connecting local economies tighter to the world market. NGOs having gained
prominence in the aftermath of the demise of the development state and ISI strategies
promoted and carried out this great transformation by mobilizing public opinion in the donor
countries and setting up small-scale development projects in the aided countries by stressing
the virtues of increased popular participation, gender-specific interventions and poverty-
reduction schemes. Since the creation of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Allegre
social movements are challenging these development strategies by campaigning for popular
control on economic reforms and protection against frenzy competition.

The real world of the NGOs

It is an undeniable fact that the NGOs are nowadays playing important roles in global
governance in virtually every issue area. The role of the NGOs in the “aid chain” has become
crucial in the process of enforcing the neoliberal development agenda on the masses in the
developing world as their work rests on a sense of commitment to finding new solutions to
old problems. NGOs are recipients of aid money for basic services replacing the post-colonial

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state as a prime player. Influenced by NGOs and because of growing trade possibilities
communities are abandoning former subsistence modes of production and adopting income-
maximising modes of production now that accumulation of money wealth is playing a major
role in the local economies. In addition, NGOs are gaining importance in the developing
world owing to the increasing preference by Western countries to route donor funds through
international NGOs rather than national governments, which are perceived as corrupt,
bureaucratic or incompetent.

Since the 1990s when neoliberalism became dominant and NGOs were integrated within the
framework of international capitalism, NGOs are run like financial enterprises investing in
fundraising, marketing and increasing market shares around humanitarian and advisory work.
They pay their consultants and managers “world salaries”. Like multinational corporations
they establish subsidiaries in many countries and tap money from donor governments and
international institutions. Since the 1990s these characteristics were shaped by their donors
and their growing interaction with the international institutions and their think tanks.(3)

International NGO support perpetuates nonetheless a dependency syndrome by the state on

NGOs and does not help states develop capacity in sectors such as relief or disaster response
where NGOs dominate. NGO’s legitimacy, representativeness and accountability are often
called into question. In addition, NGOs do not have many checks and balances or are not as
accountable as governments to the electorate or private companies to shareholders. That more
regulation is needed is thus obvious.(4) Some even denounce the growing influence of NGOs
in global governance, insisting on their negative impact on global democracy. Tina Wallace,
for instance, insists on the double role NGOs are, perhaps unwittingly, playing. Many NGOs
oppose the role of the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), but in the mean time they prefer campaigning for human rights and for the
environment. It is also noticeable that ‘few lobby around the tight conditionality governing
donor aid to governments’.(5)

In the era of neoliberal triumphalism much attention is paid by development ideologues to the
development of microfinance and land tenure rights in order to sponsor bottom-up capitalist
development. Financialization of all welfare arrangements is seen as a remedy to all kind of
rigidities imposed by governments and interest groups in order ‘to put into circulation saved
capital, immobilized to such an extent that it could hardly bear fruit.’(6) Neoliberals want to
demonstrate that the major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting
from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. However, these ideologues (Hernando de
Soto, William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs) here discussed and their NGO counterparts easily
forget that there may be legitimate and important reasons why people resist their neoliberal
reform proposals or prefer adopting exit practices.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, NGO’s have become key agents in implementing the
neoliberal development agenda because they are understood as dynamic organizations within
an open-ended process. In addition, NGOs constitute multiple realities being many things at
the same time. However, NGOs are not things but processes. In general, NGOs are considered
as being shaped by people and grassroots processes, while others view NGOs primarily as
outcomes of historical and political processes. For instance, Yash Tandon (South Centre,
Geneva) views NGOs as tools of international neoliberal development policies. In addition,
NGOs can be criticized as by-products of transnational interest groups and big corporations
advantaging the growing impact of Christian churches and other denominations on local
populations.

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Due to the influential work of Michel Foucault(7) we can better understand why the present
development discourses have excluded history and politics (thiermondisme) from the
development agenda. According to Arturo Escobar, a space was created in which only certain
things can be said and imagined.(8) The neoliberal development discourse attained hegemony
in when NGOs were enabled to provide services to the vested interests by sustaining failed
states. Geof Wood (University of Bath) speaks in this respect of a franchise state,(9) where
state responsibilities are franchised to NGOs and mediated to a considerable extent by the
ideological prescriptions of donors. Although many authors celebrate the role of development
NGOs in civil society for its potency to advance human dignity, this has also evoked a critical
view of NGOs as advancing the neoliberal project. Yash Tandon calls NGOs the missionaries
of the new neoliberal era. But he also noted ‘a growing fatigue among citizens and politicians
of OECD countries about Aid and its effectiveness.’(10)

Nowadays, donor governments have created systems and procedures for tighter monitoring of
money and management efficiency (see Table 1). New donors’ rules to southern governments
leave very little space for NGOs and their contributions, except in support of the development
plans of southern governments. The new Aid Effectiveness Regime -called Paris Agenda-
focuses on direct contributions from donors to the national development plans of developing
countries, in particular in Africa.

Logical frameworks

Most works on the rise of the NGOs tell us little about their practical workings and the
management techniques they use. They make us believe that NGOs are operating according to
a single discursive discourse. Local responses are ignored. Every day development situations
in communities are not studied. Moreover, there exist also progressive NGOs combating
reactionary ones. Progressive NGOs are usually linked to social or civic movements and
oppositional political parties developing their own specific discourses, sometimes packed into
a (political) liberalization discourse. Some NGOs are transmitting conservative or Christian
values to the developing world. Christian sects in the US sponsor them and under George
Bush’s presidency they could play a privileged role in AIDS campaigns.

This indicates that the NGOs development discourse is extremely diverse and flexible. It uses
two distinct languages, one of rational management, and the other one of participation.
Development discourses are founded on different understandings of how development occurs,
who directs it and where accountability lies. While packaging of aid by institutional and
NGOs draws heavily on these different languages, the mechanisms of rational management
have been systematized, institutionalized and embedded in aid bureaucracies. Critiques of
why development fails are always highlighting problems such as poor planning, weak
ownership by local stakeholders, lack of beneficiary participation, corruption and the weak
capacity of individuals, organizations, and institutions. The push to improve planning and
control is reflected in the shift away from loose project formats to the almost universal use of
logical frameworks (logframes), the proliferation of project cycle assessment procedures and
guidelines, and indicator-based reporting systems designed to show cost-effectiveness and
impact. Participation is now promoted as an essential element in local development. However,
aid is not disbursed using participatory mechanisms, but logframes (see Table 1). Thus the
need for planning and control outweighs the push for participation at the bureaucratic level.

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Table 1: Changing development priorities and aid instruments for donors and NGOs

Time Donor focus Donor NGO focus NGO instruments

period instruments
1970s Basic needs; Projects Solidarity between Very varied project
household especially NGOs north and application forms,
surveys; anti- infrastructure; south; focus on individuality
corruption integrated rural voluntary spirit and develop within each
development voluntary donations NGO; many NGOs
projects; technical have no centralized
experts uniform documents
or policies
1980s Effective projects, Logframes; Reducing role of Some NGOs start to
donor-controlled; technical expatriates, adopt logframes,
appropriate cooperation; employing national most still use own
macro-economic overseas training; staff; NGOs as pilots frameworks; many
policies; social investment and catalysts; NGOs have few
structural funds; structural identifying good organizational
adjustment (later adjustment practice: gender, policies and
with a human programmes environment, poverty uniform procedures,
face) mandatory upholding IMF focus, participation larger ones start to
for many requirements for and Participatory introduce policies
countries liberalization; Rural Appraisal on project
projects continue (PRA); concern with management and
to dominate aid appropriate images of gender; some
disbursement the south; NGOs focus on
development evaluation
education in north;
growing use of
official aid
1990s Projects to focus Participatory rural Focus on capacity- Sharp rise in use of
on the poor, appraisal, building for southern logframes as key
address gender stakeholder NGOs; scaling up project management
and be analysis, process successful service tool; adoption of
environmentally projects within delivery projects; strategic planning
sensitive; Logframe sustainability; as main
democracy, good Analysis (LFA). advocacy work in the organizational tool;
governance, More direct north; gender concerns with
sound economic funding of NGOs, mainstreaming; accountability; rise
policies and less technical moving from projects in reporting;
national cooperation, more to programmes; significant growth
government consultancies; massive increase in of Monitoring and
ownership of sector-wide donor funding Evaluation (M&E);
poverty agendas; approaches beginning to assess
end to poverty (SWAPs), Highly impact of advocacy
Indebted Poor work
Countries (HIPC)
initiatives (debt
rebates to the

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 poor); different
approaches to
getting good
reports from
NGOs (always a
problem)
2000s Reduction of National Increase in advocacy Focus on learning
corruption; programmes and and lobbying work; organizations;
transparent and frameworks: focus on rights; shift almost universal
accountable Poverty toward learning use of logframe
governments; Reduction organizations; global analysis (LFA),
decentralization Strategy Plans strategies; growing strategic planning,
of governments (PRSPs) and reliance on donor reporting systems,
and donors; sound Poverty funding; anxiety impact assessment
macroeconomics Reduction and about decline of and use of
and pro-poor Growth Facility’s Department for development
growth; ending (PRGFs), International indicators, from
poverty through comprehensive Development (DFID) project to global
Millennium development funding as it shifts to level; focus on
Development frameworks; direct support to Millennium
Goals (MDGs); targets and governments Development Goals
getting voices of Millennium (MDGs), impact,
the poor into Development efficiency, and
policies; making Goals (MDGs); effectiveness; rise
globalization funding to in evaluation and
work for people government – concerns with cost-
budget support. effectiveness
Influencing as
important as
important as
resource
transfers;
harmonization
between donors;
decline of
projects; contracts

Millennium Development Goals

Several United Nations conferences and summits held after the fall of the Berlin Wall framed
an unprecedented global consensus on a shared neoliberal vision of development that laid the
groundwork for the Millennium Summit in September 2000. At this summit the largest
gathering of world leaders in history adopted the UN Millennium Declaration, committing the
nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of time-
bound targets, with a deadline of 2015, that have become known as the Millenium
Development Goals (MDGs) (see Table 2). A series of targets and other challenging time-
bound goals were designed and later brought in into the MDGs providing a compelling

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programme to address those needs and to pursue the full scope of the United Nations
Development Agenda. The MDGs conveyed the hope that extreme poverty, disease, and
environmental degradation could be alleviated with the wealth, the new technologies, and the
global awareness the neoliberal drive was promoting. The rhetoric of development, especially
poverty-focused development, is that it must be locally generated and ‘owned’, that it has to
build strong local organizations and ‘civil society’ in order to be effective and sustainable.
Governments wanting to receive bilateral aidflows now have to complete Poverty Reduction
Strategies (PRSs), in which ‘civil society’ plays its designated participatory role. However,
the Bretton Woods institutions and donor countries are not allowing alternative views on
fundamental questions of the neoliberal economic policy agenda.

The MDGs became the world’s time-bound and quantified targets for addressing extreme
poverty in its many dimensions-income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and
exclusion-while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability. The
MDGs wisely recognize that poverty has many dimensions, not only low cash income, but
also vulnarability to lack of access to education and basic amenities (water, sanitation) or the
ongoing process of environmental degradation and diseases (AIDS). Achieving the MDGs
would require investments in agricultural inputs (fertilizers, irrigation, seeds, storage
facilities, etc.), basic health, education, power, transport, and communication services, safe
drinking water and sanitation, etc.

Today, the MDGs are also targeting basic human rights-the rights of each person on the planet
to health, education, shelter, and security. Sub-Saharan Africa is the epicentre of crisis, with
continuing food insecurity, a rise of extreme poverty, stunningly high child and maternal
mortality, and large numbers of people living in slums, and a widespread shortfall for most of
the MDGs. Asia is the region with the fastest growth, but even there hundreds of millions of
people remain in extreme poverty, and even fast-growing countries fail to achieve some of the
non-income goals. Other regions have mixed records: notably Latin America, the transition
economies, and the Middle East and North Africa, often with slow or no progress on some of
the goals and persistent inequalities undermining progress on others.

Table 2: The Millennium Development Goals

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower
women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other
Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the
proportion of people whose income is less
than one dollar a day
Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the
proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
Ensure that by 2015 children everywhere,
boys and girls alike, will be able to complete
a full course of primary schooling
Eliminate gender disparity in primary and
secondary education, preferably by 2005, and
to all levels of education no later than 2015
Reduce by two thirds, between 1990 and
2015, the under-five mortality rate
Reduce by three quarters, between 1990 and
2015, the maternal mortality ratio
Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the

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diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for
development
spread of HIV/AIDS;
Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the
incidence of malaria and other major diseases
Integrate the principle of sustainable
development into country policies and
programs and reverse the loss of
environmental resources;
Halve by 2015 the proportion of people
without sustainable access to safe drinking
water and basic sanitation;
By 2020 to have achieved a significant
improvement in lives of at least 100 million
slum dwellers
Develop further an open, rule-based,
predictable, non-discriminatory trading and
financial system. Includes a commitment to
good governance, development, and poverty
reduction – both nationally and
internationally;
Address the special needs of the least
developed countries. This includes: tariff- and
quota-free access for least developed
countries’ exports; an enhanced program of
debt relief for HIPC and cancellation of
official bilateral debt; and more generous
ODA for countries committed to poverty
reduction;
Address the special needs of landlocked
countries and small island developing states
(through the Program of Action for the
Sustainable Development of Small Island
Developing States and the outcome of the
twenty-second special session of the General
Assembly);
Deal comprehensively with the debt problems
of developing countries through national and
international measures in order to make debt
sustainable in the long run;
In cooperation with developing countries,
develop and implement strategies for decent
and productive work for youth;
In cooperation with pharmaceutical
companies, provide access to affordable,
essential drugs in developing countries;
In cooperation with the private sector, make
available the benefits of new technologies,
especially information and communications.
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As part of a larger development agenda encompassing the wider dimensions of human
development, these MDGs address problems necessitating long-term approaches. The
question of interlinkages between development and conflict and the differential impact of
globalization were put on the development agenda. Inequalities among and within
developing countries in relationship to global economic governance constituted a vast
array of interlinked issues ranging from gender equality, social integration, health,
employment, education, the environment and population to human rights, finance and
governance were defined and interlinked with the MDGs and the implementation of a
general development agenda.(11)

The MDGs are viewed with some cynicism as the eight goals and eighteen targets repeat long
held commitments not fulfilled in the past. The first seven goals call for an ambitious program
of sharp cuts in poverty, disease, and environmental degradation, while the eighth goal is
essentially a commitment of global partnership to achieve the first seven goals. Its critics
argue that in the past most projects had failed lamentably because of wide-spread corruption
and expanding bureaucracy. Today, development organizations and donor governments try to
design monitoring systems to ensure “good governance” and “democratic rule”. Jeffrey
Sachs: ‘Our compact, our commitment, in the rich countries should be to help all poor
countries where the collective will is present to be responsible partners in endeavor. For the
others, where authoritarian or corrupt regimes hold sway, the consequences for the population
are likely to be tragic, but the responsabilities of the rich world are also limited.’(12)

The basic problem is, however, capital. The developing world is in high need of investment
funds beyond humanitarian intervention. Hence, the idea of a “Marshall Plan” combined with
debt reduction for the poorest countries. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC)
Initiative launched in 1996 was a recognition that the structural adjustment strategy of the
Bretton Woods institutions had failed. The Jubilee 2000 campaign sought to cancel the debts
of the poorest countries, but met only the sympathy of religious organizations and NGOs.

De Soto’s Mystery of Capital

The basic argument in de Soto’s book The Mystery of Capital(13) is that it attempts to explain
why most countries have not developed by reopening the exploitation of the source of capital
and thus explain how to correct the economic failures of poor countries. The main hurdle that
prevents dead capital from becoming “live capital” is a sociopolitical system that combines
the state’s political and bureaucratic sluggishness, the lack of information, and the absence of
a legal property system. The book is based on the thesis that the major stumbling block that
keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital
and an array of unused physical assets in developing countries. That “dead capital” if used as
an asset, would lead to capitalist development. Hence, the moment is ripe, in the eyes of De
Soto, to solve the problems of why capitalism is triumphant in the West and stalling
practically everywhere. De Soto: ‘The single most important source of funds for new
businesses in the United States is a mortgage on the entrepreneur’s house’ as the basis ‘for the
creation of reliable and universal public utilities, and a foundation for the creation of
securities (like mortgage-backed bonds) that can then be rediscounted and sold in secondary

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markets. By this process the West injects life into assets and makes them generate capital’.
(14)

The problem of persistent underdevelopment notwithstanding many decades of aid programs

has given birth to harsh criticism from authors blaming protagonists like Jeffrey Sachs
believing in the virtues of a ‘big push’ in public investments to produce a rapid increase in
underlying productivity, both rural and urban. The IMF and the World Bank or aid agencies
are identified as the main protagonists of the ‘big push’ strategy implying that the larger the
aid is already, the larger the additional growth benefit from an additional injection of aid. This
thesis is contested in Easterly’s book The White Man’s Burden in which the author attacks the
presumed usefulness and efficiency of foreign aid and related Western efforts to help the
world’s most desperate people. The author pleads, just like De Soto, for a bottom-up strategy
and institutional reforms in order to make the market work while giving the “searchers”
(profit seeking entrepreneurs) an opportunity to deploy economic activities.(15) Easterly
believes in the great accomplishment of the markets because ‘they reconcile the choices
people make for themselves with the choices other people are making’, without the help of a
“planner”.(16) Like all neoliberals, Easterly believes in property rights and legal titles, which
means preconditions like a long-standing written tradition and land records. The problem is
that in many developing countries land ownership is more often subject to oral traditions,
customary arrangements, or informal community agreements than to formal titles. Easterly
recognizes it: ‘Common property is subject to the “tragedy of the commons” problem, in
which each herdsman overgrazes the pasture because the costs are borne by the community
rather than by the herdsman.’(17) Easterly forgets, nonetheless, to analyze the case of Darfur
where these armed herdsmen are cleansing with the backing of the Arab world the western
part of Sudan from peasants.(18)

Establishing tenure rights has become a corner stone in neoliberal development strategies and
refers to the key role of legislators, legal consultants and academics in tenure reform. These
players exert their influence by translating the economic and regulatory interests of the World
Bank, civil society groups and commercial lenders into questions of law. Land is now more
than simply providing a shelter and a means of livelihood. It has become some kind of vehicle
for investing, accumulating wealth, and transferring it between generations. For the World
Bank land is now fundamental not just to poverty reduction but to economic growth. Property
rights give households access to credit and thus to make investments and to develop a rural
credit market. ‘The acquisition of secure tenure rights not only increases investment in land,
for example in the form of labor inputs, it is also seen as increasing the supply of credit from
formal credit institutions using land as collateral.’(19)

Land tenure is always insecure and competition over land intensifies due to population
pressure, migration, climatic change or a salariat looking for land in order to improve their
food security. Property rights go hand in hand with land grab, illegal appropriation, steeling of
valuable resources and the penetration of multinational corporations wanting to accaparate
natural resources. The dependence of the poor on the commons increased during the period of
structural adjustment programs dictated by the World Bank and the IMF. Emerging rural
movements and squatting tried since then to a find an answer to this problem by organizing
resistance to the market forces imposing property rights on natural resources such as water.

A former Central Bank President of Peru like De Soto avoids this pressing problem by simply
referring to the ‘missing lessons of US history’, or how US law was ‘made to serve popular
capital formation and economic growth’ by removing legal obstacles to squatting. In the

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beginning, migrants who settled the lands were left no alternative but to begin fashioning their
own ‘laws’, especially those pertaining to property. Only in 1862 the Congress passed the
celebrated Homestead Act giving 160 free acres to any settler willing to live on the land for
five years. In De Soto’s discourse, the American way of adapting the law to economic and
social needs should be considered as an example to the developing world. ‘In the long and
arduous process of integrating extralegal property rights American legislators and jurists
created a new system much more conducive to a productive and dynamic market economy.
This process constituted a revolution borne out of the normative expectations of ordinary
people, which the government developed into a systematized and professional formal
structure.’(20) This ‘long and arduous process’ was also accompanied by the systematic
extermination of the indigenous Americans, a fact De Soto omits mentioning in his tale of the
‘missing lessons’ in US history.

The item of ethnic violence and cleansing is not absent in the neoliberal development
discourse. In many cases authors prefer referring to ‘special cases’ of large-scale violations of
human rights (Rwanda or Darfur). Or they prefer focusing on para-economic phenomena not
directly related to De Soto’s ‘property rights’. However, ethnic cleansing is closely related to
property rights if they refer to barred access to natural resources and/or oligarchic control of
state power. In the mean time, millions of ‘displaced persons’ are created, this time not by
‘spontaneous economic processes’ or migratory movements to the big cities, but by militias
terrorrising sedentary peasants. In the Middle East and Africa, millions of propertiless
individuals are nowadays vegetating in camps for (internally) displaced persons. De Soto
prefers analyzing this phenomenon from the point of view of Europe’s industrialization
process having started in the 17th century and culminating in the 19th and early 20th century in
a massive exodus of beggars, peddlers and thieves to the New World. Then, politicians began
adapting the law to the needs of common people, ‘including their expectations about property
rights’, because they had understood that ‘the problem was not people but the law, which was
discouraging and preventing people from being more productive’.(21) However, this period
of European history is also know as the ‘era of mass mobilization’ because of the rise of the
(social-democratic) labor parties wanting to regulate wages and consumer prices. Not
establishing property rights, but social rights had become the labour movement’s major
demand. Voluntary insurance was superseded by a system of comprehensive and universal
social insurance covering all social and health risks(22) when social-democratic parties left
their political ghetto in the 1930 and allied with peasant - or Christian-democratic - parties
mainly based on farmers’ organizations wanting to regulate agricultural production and
prices.

Most development organization are nowadays favoring broad-based agricultural growth with
a key role played by small-scale farmers in combination with an activation of the potential of
landless rural agents in order to re-engineer rural society. Lessons drawn from economic
development and poverty reduction strategies implemented in poor and crisis-ridden countries
stress the necessity to shift focus away from purely output-led growth towards distribution-
oriented rural development policies, thus reconciling efficiency in creating economic growth
with equity.(23) Economic growth is always subjected to income (or profit) maximization.
However, with the shift to income maximization, as against subsistence, class differentiation
created new forms of social and political conflicts. Growth in the size of herds and agriculture
led to resource scarcity and military instability. An income maximizing mode of production
leading to the formation of a class of prosperous peasants or nomads destroyed the
composition of a relatively fixed full belly basket of needs. Competing claims became

11
extremely difficult to be settled in several African countries where herdsmen and
agriculturalists are clashing.(24)

In De Soto’s discourse it is assured that much of Marx’s thought ‘is outdated because the
situation today is not the same as in Marx’s Europe. Potential capital is no longer the privilege
of the few’ because the West managed to set up a ‘legal framework that gave most people
access to property and the tools of production. Marx would probably be shocked to find how
in developing countries much of the teeming mass does not consist of oppressed legal
proletarians but of appressed extralegal small entrepreneurs with a sizeable amount of assets’.
(25) Notwithstanding De Soto’s asset-management discourse, actual tendencies are totally
different. Proletarianization will not be stopped by the proliferation of property entitlements.
Famine breaking traditional relationships are more and more accompanying the growth of the
number of landless or assetless persons, thus the number of proletarians unable to survive by
selling their labor force. The growth of the number of landless persons is often masked by the
denial that they are a part of a broader “community” taking care of them.

The breakdown of traditional forms of redistributive reciprocity and its replacement by

individualized access to resources with market-based exchange relationships are, by the way,
also sources of inter-ethnic conflicts(26) and migratory movements to the cities. This
phenomenon is typical for “primary accumulation”(27) taking place in the developing world.
The lack of access by the poor to natural resources constitutes, however, a very pressing
problem the neoliberal ideologues refused hitherto to discuss. Nowadays, the indigenous
classes in Latin America and Africa are mobilizing against that neoliberal globalization
process destroying tropical forests, changing the earth’s climate and putting into question their
physical survival.(28) These protests have given birth to social and political movements
contesting the supremacy of capital and, especially in Latin America, they could gain some
importance among the poor rural and urban populations. This also means that there are no
easy solutions to the poverty and famine problems as is mentioned in the MDGs.

New Movements, New Discourses?

The campaigning efforts of the NGOs are hitherto focusing on raising private and public
funds and NGOs criticism is usually limited to attacking specific aspects of the neoliberal
development agenda without questioning the roots of its paradigm. In the mean time, the ‘real
world of NGOs’(29) is challenged both by the world development movement and new global
economic players. Especially China’s growing public presence in Africa has captured the
world’s imagination because of her deliberate promotion of foreign policy to provide aid and
concessionary loans in the country’s global search for untapped resources and new markets.
(3) The new global economic architecture has furthermore brought in such players as BRIC
(Brazil, Russia, India and China) and IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) who are “flexing”
their economic muscles in search of energy, minerals or food resources worldwide. In the
developing world, these countries are now acting as “donors”, but outside the OECD
framework and the “real world of the NGOs”. Their interventions in many countries (sub-
Saharan Africa and central Asia, for example) are having enormous impact on development of
those societies and economies looking for new opportunities. In some ways, these shifts in
international aid architecture are both inevitable and desirable.

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Since the 1990s, globalization, economic growth and institutional maturity in southern
societies did begin to create ‘emerging’ countries and regions. Strengthening state regimes
and institutions to become capable for service delivery and accountable for democratic
governance is an important strategy for development and poverty eradication. However, this
shift poses new challenges and dilemmas for many actors involved in development
cooperation, including Southern and Northern NGOs. The WSF as an open meeting place for
reflecting thinking, democratic debates and interlinking for effective action by groups and
movements of civil society that are not only opposed to neoliberalism and capitalist
domination, but also striving for a planetary society. This has become a permanent process of
seeking and building alternatives by propagating the slogan ‘another world is possible’. The
alternatives proposed at the WSF stand in opposition to globalization directed by transnational
capital and international institutions.(31) However, not all development forums have broken
with neoliberalism. Some are still largely influenced by transnational capital.(32)

Discontent in the developing countries about the functioning of the international institutions
inspired a debate on their possible reform. Many proposals for reform are circulating. A new
WTO should be established together with a reformed global financial architecture of the
World Bank and the IMF. The key points of these proposals and ideas pointed out at the
International Forum on Globalization might be synthesized as a double movement of
deglobalization of the national economy and the construction of a ‘pluralist system of global
economic governance’.(33) The context is the increasing evidence not only of the poverty,
inequality and stagnation that have accompanied the spread of globalized systems of
production but also of their unsustainability and fragility.(34) In this deglobalization discourse
emphasis on production for export has to be reoriented to emphasis on production for the local
market and an economy re-embedded in society, rather than having society driven by the
economy.(35)

References

(1) Alex E. Fernández Jilberto and André Mommen, ‘Setting the neoliberal development
agenda. Structural adjustment and export-led industrialization’, in Alex E. Fernández Jilberto
and André Mommen (eds), Liberalization in the Developing World. Institutional and
Economic Changes in Latin America, Africa and Asia, London and New York: Routledge,
1996, pp. 1-27.
(2) The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Beijing, China - September
1995 - Action for Equality, Development and Peace, called for ‘equality between women and
men’ by focusing on ‘human rights and a condition for social justice and is also a necessary
and fundamental prerequisite for equality, development and peace. A transformed partnership
based on equality between women and men is a condition for people-centered sustainable
development. A sustained and long-term commitment is essential, so that women and men can
work together for themselves, for their children and for society to meet the challenges of the
twenty-first century.’
http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/plat1.htm#statement
(3) Tina Wallace, ‘NGO Dilemmas: Trojan horses for global neoliberalism’, in Socialist
Register 2004, London: The Merlin Press, 2003, pp. 204-205.
(4) Henry Zakumumpa, ‘Foreign aid: NGOs, the new colonial powers in Africa?’, in Daily
Monitor (Kampala), 29 December 2008, p. 6.
(5) Tina Wallace, o.c., p. 203.

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(6) Antonio Negri in Conversation with Raf Valvola Scelsi, Goodbye Mr. Socialism, New
York: Seven Stories Press, 2008, pp. 180
(7) See David Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance. From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: The MIT Press, 2005, pp. 57-100.
(8) Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, elevated him to the status of post-
development icon. For many critics today, development has reached an impasse. Escobar and
the post development theorists have built upon the work of many others to expose how ‘…
development was shown to be a pervasive cultural discourse with profound consequences for
the production of social reality in the so-called Third World.’ A. Escobar, ‘Beyond the search
for a paradigm? Post-development and beyond’, in Development, Vol. 43, No. 4, December
2000, pp. 11-14. In his later work, Escobar has begun to look beyond the failures and
limitations of state, market and international aid, to a form of social change led by new social
movements and progressive non-governmental organizations.
(9) http://www.bath.ac.uk/pip/directory/profile/2964
(10)
www.ontwikkelingsverandering.nl/uploaded_files/Theme_5_Tasks_North_and_South_PAPE
R_and_COMMENT.pdf -
(11) The promoter is Jeffrey Sachs, a well-known economist and neoliberal advisory worker
to the post-Communist Polish and Russian governments. Today, he is a special advisor to
President Barack Obama and Director of the Earth Institute, Professor at Columbia
University, etc.
(12) Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty, London: Penguin Books, 2005, p. 269.
(13) Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital. Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and
Fails Everywhere Else, London: Black Swann Books, 2001.
(14) Ibidem, p. 7.
(15) William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden. Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have
Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, London: Penguin Books, 2006.
(16) Ibidem, p. 73.
(17) Ibidem, p. 93.
(18) Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, Darfur. A Short History of a Long War, London and New
York: Zed Books; Cape Town: David Philip; in association with the International African
Institute, 2005.
(19) Ambreena Manji, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa. From Communal Tenure to
Free Markets, London and New York: Zed Books, 2006, p. 7.
(20) De Soto, o.c., p. 158.
(21) De Soto, o.c., p. 106.
(22) Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Politics Against Markets. The Social Democratic Road to
Power, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
(23) Chrystal Hendrikse, ‘Faces of Rural Poverty in Contemporary Rwanda: Linking
Livelihood Profiles and Institutional Processes’, Unpublished PhD Antwerp University, 2009.
(24) Dev Nathan, ‘Darfur: Primary accumulation and genocide’, in Economic & Political
Weekly, August, 2008, pp. 23-26; David Anderson and Vigdis Broch-Due (eds), The Poor
Are Not Us: Poverty and Pastoralism in Eastern Africa, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000.
(25) De Soto, o.c., p. 229.
(26) DN, ‘Darfur. Ethnic cleansing as primary accumulation’, in Economic & Political
Weekly, July 9, 2005, pp. 3006-3007.
(27) On this concept see Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Volume 1,
Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1965, pp. 741-791.

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(28) François Houtart, Deslegitimar el capitalismo. Reconstruir la esperanza, Caracas:
Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura, 2007, pp. 191-199.
(29) Dorothea Hilhorst, The Real World of NGOs. Discourses, Diversity and Development,
London and New York: Zed Press, 2003.
(30) Chris Alden, China in Africa, London and New York: Zed Books; Cape Town: David
Philip; in association with the International African Institute, Royal African Society, Social
Science Research Council, 2007; Dorothy-Grace Guerrero and Firoze Manji (eds), China’s
New Role in Africa and the South. A Search for a New Perspective, Cape Town, Nairobi and
Oxford: Fahamu and Focus on the Global South, 2008.
(31) See the principles of the WSF, in Jeremy Gilbert, Anticapitalism and Culture. Radical
Theory and Popular Politics, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008, pp. 91-93.
(32) The principal forum for global water policy discussions is not the UN but the World
Water Forum, a mostly pro-privatization, tri-annual gathering of government delegations,
non-governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and private industry
representatives. It is convened by the World Water Council, a French non-profit whose board
of governors is dominated by water privateers. Daniel Moss, ‘Managing World Water’, in
Foreign Policy in Focus, June 3, 2009. http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6163
(33) Bello, o.c., p. 112.
(34) The International Forum on Globalization declares: ‘We strongly doubt the continued
viability of capitalism and its accompanying doctrines such as hyper economic growth. We
feel it is crucial to openly discuss this and propose alternative models. IFG has amassed some
of the world’s leading thinkers from a wide variety of disciplines and political perspectives
and engaged them in an ongoing strategic conversation, leading up to a proposed series of
public events and publications addressing the essential issues of the post capitalist era.’
http://www.ifg.org/programs.htm#postcapitalism
(35) See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon, 1957 (2nd edition).

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