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• Poverty and Capital
  • Programme
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Conferences

Programme

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• Programme [PDF 50KB].

Papers

• Abstracts of Papers [PDF 150KB].

Keynote Speakers included:

Ha-Joon Chang, University of Cambridge, UK.
Francisco Ferreira, The World Bank, USA.
Ben Fine, SOAS, University of London, UK.
Barbara Harris-White, University of Oxford, UK.
Branco Milanovic, The World Bank, USA.
John Toye, University of Oxford, UK.
Anna Tsing, University of California Santa Cruz.

The ESRC Global Poverty Research Group (GPRG) is a multidisciplinary collaboration between social scientists at the Institute for Development Policy and Management (IDPM) at the University of Manchester and economists at the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University of Oxford. Manchester University has now consolidated its position as a leading institution for the interdisciplinary study of poverty through the establishment of the Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI).

GPRG research to date has highlighted the dimensions of engagement with market economies as a key issue for poor people in developing countries. The interdisciplinary challenges posed by working between economics and qualitative social sciences have also emphasised the centrality of the market paradigm for analysing social dimensions of change and assessing impacts on development. Perspectives from orthodox economics at times confront the perspectives of social science, particularly as they relate to the normativity of development models and assumptions about the links between economic growth and human wellbeing, concepts of markets and capital, and ideas about what drives positive change for the poorest.

The conference was organised around three main themes FINANCE AND ECONOMICS, CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT and THE POLITICS AND INSTITUTIONALISATION OF CAPITALISM. The conference comprised of plenary and parallel sessions, with a full plenary for each major theme. The conference featured international speakers from across social science and economics related disciplines and participants from leading development agencies and civil society organisations. The aim was to provide an interdisciplinary space for the cross fertilisation of ideas between academics, policy makers and practitioners, and between different disciplinary takes on core processes of social transformation and economy.

CONFERENCE ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS

Tony Addison (Professor, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, UK),
Paul Cammack (Professor, Politics Department, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK),
John Gledhill (Professor, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, UK),
Barbara Harriss-White (Director, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University, UK),
Stephen Kidd (Team Leader, Equity and Rights Team, DFID, UK),
Francie Lund (Associate Professor, School of Development Studies, University of KwaZuluNatal, South Africa),
Imran Matin (Director, Research and Evaluation Division, BRAC, Bangladesh),
Nancy Scheper-Hughes (Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California Berkeley, USA),
Joseph Semboja (Executive Director, Research on Poverty Alleviation, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania),
Joseph Stiglitz (Chair, Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester, UK and IPD, Columbia University, New York, USA).

Conference Themes

1. Finance, Growth, Redistribution & Well Being

The first theme focused on the links from growth to poverty reduction, inequality and social wellbeing. It interrogated the forms of investment that accompany development processes within capitalism. How does development finance support or undermine capitalist development? What are the redistributive effects of capitalist development?

With much of the global south regularly represented as marginalised by, or marginal to, the global economy, we will explore how social relations within capitalist economy selectively produce economic and social inclusion and exclusion and the disciplinary processes which define worth and citizenship.

Is there an underlying logic to capitalist accumulation that ultimately makes mass under/unemployment and immiseration inevitable, or is globalisation already throwing up evidence of potential for structural change in the system (through national processes of resistance to TNCs and regional realignments and various kinds of reformist proposals now on the table for making the reduction of inequalities a priority)?

What capitalist instruments can enhance poverty reduction? Can trajectories of growth include the poor? Is poverty creation an inevitable by product of capitalist development?

2. Moral Economics: Commodification and Capitalist Development

Scarcity is a ruling feature of economic development under capitalism. But how is it regulated, and frugality turned into destitution? Through what processes are people incorporated into capitalist economic relationships? What social processes characterise commodification? How far can uncommodified qualities be counted within formal economic models? Do current models undervalue the assets of the poor? What are the effects of commodifcation on social relations and the environment? What is the nature of moral economies under capitalisms? How does the commodification of human capital support capitalist development? More broadly, is there a space beyond or away from capitalism viewed as a global system?

What are the prospects not only for new forms of capitalism, but new forms of organisation within a market economy framework? Is it still possible to imagine socialised forms of property and distribution that might be distinct from the kind of (state capitalism, alternative industrialism?) represented by the USSR? To what extent is it possible to imagine systems based on private property and market relationships that differ fundamentally in their distributive principles and capacity for providing dignified livelihoods from those generated by global capitalist corporations and capitalist developmentalist states.

How are work and personal security being transformed under current capitalist regimes? What are the political implications of middle class proletarianization in rich and middle income countries? How does capitalism generate wellbeing? And for whom?

3. The Politics and Institutionalisation of Capitalism

Within this theme we explored work on the structure, system and institutionalisation of capitalism. We could ask, for example, whether it is possible to distinguish the capitalism of the North Atlantic countries from other forms of capitalism (not simply institutionally–culturally–socially but as competing systems) and the extent to which the hegemonic role of the former supported by "extra-economic" geopolitical power is actually ceding to the contemporary strength and wealth of other centres of accumulation. This has ramifications for the meaning of ‘global’ and ‘multinational’, suggesting that the current global signification of the 'development agenda' and the Bretton Woods institutions could shift in significant ways in the near future, largely but not exclusively because of China, to expose an assumed universalism based in Westphalian parochialism.

If interrelated geopolitical and economic competition continue to be the essence of capitalism, then does this create spaces for new (and possibly more socially equitable) developments within a capitalist framework in the long term or will it merely be a process of relocation of centres of accumulation with undiminished social polarisation?

How is capitalism established institutionally as a mode of organisation? What is the role of the state in fostering capitalist development? How have contemporary state forms in poor countries been shaped by capitalisms? What are the politics of capitalist incorporation? What social institutions serve capitalisms in poor countries? What are the relationships between inequalities and capitalisms? How does capitalism promote or resolve conflicts? Is capitalism facilitating emerging subjectivities in its hinterlands? What are the social consequences of global capitalism in various parts of the world?

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