Monique Deveaux: Reframing Chronic Poverty Reduction

Lecture by Monique Deveaux (University of Guelph) organized by the Department of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy

Full title: Reframing Chronic Poverty Reduction through the Insights and Strategies of Poor-led Social Movements

Poor-led social movements and organizations can enrich normative discussions about chronic poverty and how best to reduce it. I argue that such movements politicize poverty, both descriptively and prescriptively, by insisting that their members’ deprivation is caused by social relations and structures of inequality, exploitation, discrimination, and subordination. Far from calling for a simple redistribution of resources from the affluent to the poor that would leave current social, political, and economic structures more or less intact, pro-poor social movements in the global South seek to actively dismantle or reform these. Global justice theorists, I suggest, have much to learn much from poor-led movements’ insights regarding the causes and correlates of poverty, as well as from the strategies they have undertaken in their quest to transform poverty-producing social structures and relations.

Monique Deveaux is Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair in Ethics & Global Social Change at the University of Guelph in Canada.