Beyond the Redistributive Paradigm: What Philosophers Can Learn from Poor-Led Politics

Abstract

Philosophical approaches to alleviating global poverty have overlooked the contributions and insights of poor-led social and political movements. This failure to engage with the strategies and perspectives of poor communities is bound up with global justice theorists’ neglect of issues of social and political power in their prescriptions for global poverty reduction. One cause of this neglect is the prominence of the “sufficiency” doctrine, which treats poverty as strictly a matter of material lack and unmet needs. This view gives rise to the belief that poverty can best be redressed through judicious redistributive measures to reduce absolute low-welfare. Yet these assumptions are increasingly at odds with the multidimensional and relational approach to poverty that has emerged in anti-poverty policy and development studies. This approach takes structural inequalities, social exclusion, and relations of subordination and disempowerment to be central to the experience of poverty. Two emerging ethical approaches to deprivation – one emphasizing social exclusion and disempowerment, and one focusing on humiliation and misrecognition – better grasp the relational aspects of poverty. By shifting to a relational understanding of poverty and paying closer attention to the aims and strategies of poor-led organizations and movements, global justice theorists can start to think more expansively about the goals – and agents – of global poverty reduction. I illustrate the significance of looking to poor communities as agents of poverty reduction by discussing the Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), a global grassroots network of organizations dedicated to empowering communities of pavement and slum dwellers.