Social Funds, Poverty Management and Subjectification: Beyond the World Bank Approach

Since the emergence of capitalism in its overtly globalized form, the orientation of the World Bank has, in tandem with allied organizations such as IMF, ILO and WTO, shift ed towards a more global approach to poverty. Such an approach brought in its wake a global convergence in the language and conceptual tools of poverty-related programmes, exemplified by the rise of a new family of categories, such as targeting, cost-benefit, risk management, social protection, inclusion, community, social capital, etc. ( Standing, 2007 ). A global approach to poverty departs from traditional treatments of poverty in three directions. First, there is foregrounding of a universal standard of conceiving and implementing poverty-related projects (cost-benefit, targeting, etc.), with the intent of persuading/directing national agencies to follow this standard; rather than centralization, the ideal universal standard seeks decentralization. Second, poverty eradication is treated as a management problem, i.e. as materializing through top-down supervision and control of the given category ‘poor’, who are in turn seen as constitutionally vulnerable and stuck in backwardness. Third, it seeks to open a new-fangled process of subjectification 1 by shift ing the conditions in which subjects of poverty make decisions; thus there is now a growing awareness in treating subjects as active rather than docile. The second and third points seem to indicate both an ambiguity and a paradox. While presuming docile subjects, the management approach opens a conduit of participation to incite activeness in the otherwise docile poor. We will exploit this ambiguity and paradox to unpack the relation between the model of poverty management and its subject.