Together with Dennis Kucinich,
the ex-US presidential candidate,
we see poverty as a weapon of mass destruction.
1. Is poverty reduction per-se an independent, stand-alone goal in the human rights-based framework? The answer to this question is a resounding no! Consider, for instance, that poverty is going down in much of Asia, but inequality is on the rise…
2. Poverty reduction actions must thus also importantly invest* in ‘organizational capital’ so that the latter can be used as a spring board to forcefully demand the respect of all human rights (HR). Poverty reduction and the promotion of HR are not the same, but two mutually reinforcing principles¬.__¬¬¬¬
*: Essential in this investment is to train and deploy voluntary extension cadres who can and do address the wide range of social and political constraints that poor people struggle with –including HR violations and general legal matters.
3. Ultimately, at the global level, poverty reduction will depend on the replicability of many small successful structural and institutional changes made in many small places. Small is OK.
[But you have surely noticed that donors (and some NGOs) get stuck in the pilot phase of too many a ‘successful’ (though selective) development project; these, more often than not, do not set up scalable changes of the type needed and do not really give the poor access to the tools and opportunities they need to work their own way out of poverty and out of the human rights violations they are subjected to structurally; the structural causes of poverty can simply no longer be considered as givens-about-which-we-can-do-little when scaling-up or replicating successful local interventions].
4. One of the biggest challenges we face in HR work is that policy makers are generally unfamiliar with (or flatly write-off) the approach to poverty reduction that, at the same time, is geared at alleviating HR violations; sector-specific-thinking predominates and integrated-socio-political-approaches are regarded with distrust.
5. The policy makers position towards HR is influenced by their political, social and economic interests –which leads them to misuse their political power in a way that they use public-resources-under-their-control to pursue their own priorities. Once chosen, the latter development priorities often become part of the established pattern of violations of HR.
[No wonder people are rightly beginning to perceive sector-specific policies, as well as laws and the judiciary in general, in good part, as instruments of power politics].
6. Policy makers are surely faced with many options with respect to choosing development strategies; many of them move these policies closer to their personal-and-class-objectives so that the actions that go with them have a better chance of being selected.
Consider, for instance:
• On average, the poor receive a less-than-proportionate share of social spending benefits, e.g., outlays are higher on higher education and on hospitals than on primary education and primary health care.
• More often than not, social spending in poor countries benefits those at the middle of the income ladder more than those at the bottom. As a result, social spending has had a limited effect in reducing poverty and in shrinking the large gap between rich and poor.
• Poorer regions and rural areas keep falling further behind and ethnic minorities are not participating in economic growth.
[Actually, more than ¾ of the global inequality in living standards is due
to causes within countries!].
7. So, since the HR-based approach requires cross-subsidies (or redistributions) of various types, mostly from richer groups to poorer groups, the political dynamics and the broader social and political influences that affect these policy makers are determining in the choice of strategies they make –and this, without active claim-holder demands, is holding back the chances of any real progress being made in the HR front.
8. If anything is to change, it is thus a must for claim holders to change this political dynamics by exerting social and political pressure on policy makers for the strategies to be selected to unequivocally move towards addressing poverty and the HR violations that go with it.
9. Ergo, restructuring social spending –most of which, as we said, bypasses the poor– will be a key political challenge. This is really one of the big challenges for HR activists who should avoid the problem of the drunk who lost his keys and searched only around the lamppost, because that‘s where the light is.
[If we continue to-round-up-the-usual-suspects we indeed won’t make much progress. We need to look outside our comfort zones].
10. Even if a good part of the HR problems are at the local level, HR activists must also help prepare the communities they work-with to push governments to come-up with solutions to the problems of national wealth distribution and decentralized social services delivery by:
• strengthening social cohesion so that societies stay strong and mobilized as their economies grow, and
• keeping the government on its toes so that it reinvests the economic-returns-that-accompany-growth-and-debt-reduction in alleviating poverty and in respecting, protecting and fulfilling HR.
All these are every bit as much the obligation of HR activists as is their role as trainers and consciousness raisers.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org