18  From poverty to prosperity

Addressing growth, equity and ethics in a changing environment¹

Asunción Lera St. Clair and Victoria Lawson

Introduction

The Global Environmental Change and Human Security Programme (GECHS) defines human security as an integral concept, as a state that is achieved when and where individuals and communities have the options necessary to end, mitigate or adapt to threats to their human, environmental and social rights; have the capacity and freedom to exercise these options; and actively participate in pursuing these options (GECHS, 1999). As discussed in several chapters in this volume, this emphasis on agency, and on people’s and communities’ existing capacities to respond to any threats – whether social, human or environmental – presumes that there is no fundamental difference between threats and harms caused by entitlement failures or pervasive conditions of poverty, and threats and harms caused by environmental changes, including climate change. This focus on freedom to act and recognition of people’s own capacities to respond to structural and environmental conditions implies that poverty and environmental change are more than linked; they are both part of a single frame that includes both symptoms and results of unjust and unsustainable development pathways.

Furthering this line of thinking, we argue that the dominant approach to poverty studies is ill-prepared to contribute insights on the human dimensions of environmental change. This dominant approach presumes that the reduction of poverty is dependent upon continuing a vision of development that is based on increased production and consumption, unending economic growth, externalization of environmental impacts, and the underlying view that “more is better.” This is, not surprisingly one of the central arguments used by energy companies to promote the need for more oil and carbon-based energy sources. The outcomes of this approach are both destructive to nature and the source of massive inequalities; empirical evidence shows that increases in material wealth (including the wealth produced by the exploitation of oil) have ended up in the hands of a few, leaving a large number of people powerless and unable to exercise their rights, and without access to basic needs (including access to energy). What we call in this chapter “dominant poverty knowledge” (hereafter DPK) is a widespread discourse that sees the reduction of poverty as contingent upon unending growth and consumption.²

DPK ignores 1) the interconnections between poverty and prosperity and 2) the consequences of the growth agenda for the environment. The causes of poverty and processes of wealth creation are seen as unrelated, or with diverse causal linkages. Poverty and prosperity are often considered two separate categories, corresponding to two distinct social groups. Social inequality is taken as a given, and hence receives insufficient scholarly attention. Meanwhile, unending, inequitable growth remains the dominant answer to solving poverty, and it is the source of massive global environmental change all over the planet. At times when climate change and extreme weather events are making their impacts more and more visible, this dichotomy is more pronounced than ever. In a world locked in to corporate and carbon-based growth strategies, processes of mass production, financial speculation, and increasing consumption of luxuries are the prime characteristics of prosperity. When disassociated from processes of wealth creation, the poor and their poverty are depicted as outcomes of insufficient growth, rather than an unequal distribution of wealth, or the result of processes of production or governance that do not provide decently paid jobs and social services. Reducing poverty is then used to justify more of this type of growth, and thus more of these processes that associate prosperity with production of carbon-based energy sources.

Even more alarming, a continuation of current development trends means that the world will be heading towards dangerous climate change which will severely affect ecological and human systems and lead to more poverty. Impacts include accelerated sea level rise, more intense heat waves, melting of glaciers affecting river flows, droughts and floods threatening food production, or changing disease vectors that are very likely to increase poverty (Eriksen and O’Brien, 2007; Stern, 2007; Skoufias et al., 2011). Impacts will lead to displacement of affected populations and disrupted access to food, water and shelter, which in some cases could fuel conflict, more exposure to illness, and less preparedness for disasters (see IPCC, 2012). We know that all these impacts already affect the poor first and more intensely. We also know that solutions to climate change can also have negative consequences on poor people, from land grabbing for biofuels and the reordering of land for reforestation programs such as REDD, to Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) programs, which have proved detrimental to poor communities all over the world (Lohman, 2006; McMichael, 2009; Marino and Ribot, 2012). Nonetheless, such programs are often referred to as “win-win solutions” that will enable the transition to low-carbon economies and facilitate the reduction of poverty. In addition, the dominant discourse on climate change already assumes that we understand what poverty is and what the poor need in order to escape poverty. This discourse frames the relations between climate change and poverty as if climate change threatens our ability to reduce poverty, as if we already were on the path towards a just world, were it not for the “intruding” threat of climate change.

These circular narratives represent the real poverty trap, and it is a vicious one, for it diverts our attention from the actual causes of global environmental change and ecological and social vulnerability. The poor are instead used as the trump cards in arguments that resist transforming dominant socio-economic and political landscapes. A focus on “the poor” as a separate category ignores the underlying causes of poverty, those that both produce and maintain poverty and environmental destruction. It is sadly ironic that these synergistic processes (poverty and prosperity; economic growth and environmental degradation) are presented as separate issues by both dominant discourses on climate change and dominant discourses on poverty, while at the same time the continued existence of poverty serves as an excuse to continue with current development models and dependency on carbon economies.

In this chapter we explore “win-win” climate and poverty reduction strategies, including the emergent concept of “green growth” (UNRISD, 2010, 2011; Resnick et al., 2012). We argue that these ignore the structural processes that produce both poverty and negative impacts on the environment, and that they are unlikely to produce positive results or lead to what often is referred to as a “no-regrets” solution (Heltberg et al., 2009). Dominant forms of economic development have produced and are perpetuating poverty in the majority world, while also creating the current climate change crisis, despite the reality that alternatives exist (Mishan, 1967; Daly, 1991; Martinez-Alier, 2002; Jackson, 2011; Schneider et al., 2010). We suggest that a critical understanding of poverty, as relational, historically grounded, and embedded in global and local political economies would contribute to clarity about the processes and structures that underlie the problems. A critical poverty studies research agenda is needed both to prevent further environmental damage in the name of the poor, as well as to protect the poor from further socio-economic shocks and negative climate change impacts.

Dominant poverty knowledge

DPK embodies the following fundamental characteristics: it is economistic and based on neoliberal premises; it emphasizes economic over ethical concerns; and it disassociates the majority and minority worlds, depicting poverty as outside social and geographical relations, in fact obscuring the forces that produce poverty in the first place, also in advanced economies (Hickey, 2009; Mosse, 2010; Lawson, 2012; O’Connor, 2001).

First, DPK is economistic, arguing for the primacy of economic causes of poverty and for narrow quantitative and aggregative definitions of poverty, primarily in terms of income. Indeed, econometrics has become “the science” of poverty and has been influential in discounting alternatives. DPK is also methodologically individualistic, reductionist, constructing “poor people” as a category that stands outside social relations. Such perspectives disregard history, presenting both ideas and data in an ahistorical manner. They ignore the role of economic and political power differentials in creating and perpetuating poverty, limiting rather than empowering the agency of people and collectivities. DPK is based on neoliberal premises to the point of even privatizing poverty and possible policy solutions, and does so very often by situating the task of poverty reduction under the mandates of global development agencies largely driven by neoliberal politics of “aid” and consistent with the goals of global capitalism. One of the most pervasive and perverse consequences of this economistic and neoliberal view of the poor is that it ignores processes of accumulation and wealth creation that have produced and perpetuated situations of poverty across the globe.

The DPK also shifts the burden of responsibility for poverty to individuals. Poverty is explained in terms of personal deficiencies, inappropriate or even immoral behavior, or as a result of insufficient engagement with markets, rather than the result of structural socio-economic and political conditions (Schram, 2000; O’Connor, 2001; Roy, 2010; Lawson, 2012). As argued by Lawson (2012), this shifting of responsibility applies to places as well as people. Failing places are viewed as responsible for producing poverty through deficiencies of governance, corruption and/or an overall cultural disposition that is seen as preventing market forces taking hold or preventing people from engaging their (presumably inherent) entrepreneurial spirit. Poor places are framed as isolated, disconnected and inherently lacking the wherewithal (capital, free and functioning markets inter alia) to raise themselves out of poverty as recently expressed in the 2009 World Development Report.

Second, dominant poverty knowledge blinds us to the ethical and justice aspects of poverty and the poor by treating poverty issues as technical matters with managerial solutions, removed from social relations. This view leads analysts to ignore the fundamental importance of social relations (for example, in work, governance, representation of the other) between poorer sectors, middle classes and elites as sites of intervention for building lasting solutions to poverty (Deacon and Cohen, 2011; Haarstad and St. Clair, 2011; Lawson, 2012; O’Connor, 2001). The most influential global ideas about poverty follow the ethics of the market. That is, the presumption that market relations are the most fair way to allocate resources, condemning those in structural traps to their own destinies and leading to ineffectual policy solutions that have later been reframed as market failures. The space that the ethics of the market occupies has further consequences, as it displaces a serious reflection about the extent to which poverty is, in fact, not a market failure but a moral failure. Treating poverty as a technical issue prevents ethical thinking, while the dominant perception of economics as the science of poverty leads to the rejection of political science and philosophy as sources of relevant knowledge on ethics and global justice. Moreover, this technocratic understanding of poverty makes completely irrelevant the role of non-poor people’s agency, and their actual capacity to act and change the situation of the poor, while also ignoring the many ways in which poor people themselves are able to cope and to creatively act in seeking alternatives (UNRISD, 2010). It also neglects the enormous importance of global norms, such as, for example, the relations between the Treaty on Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and the lack of entitlement to medicines for the poor, or the role that global trade agreements crafted by the WTO have in perpetuating unfair global relations that benefit elites at the expense of the majority (Pogge, 2010).

Third, DPK disassociates the majority and the minority worlds by representing poverty as a problem that occurs only in the global south and ignoring the role of global and historical economic and political relations across countries and peoples. It is in this sense a methodologically territorialist framing that presents poverty as spatially static and contained, i.e., something that can be mapped. Poverty is conceived of as a problem of and in specific places, despite the fact that places are integrally connected through a multiplicity of processes that are continuously produced and reconfigured. Methodological territorialism enhances the misguided idea that poverty is not relational, while also hiding the role of the non-poor in either producing or helping to eradicate poverty. This disassociation also serves to make invisible the millions of people in advanced economies who also experience conditions of relative poverty and in some cases live close to absolute poverty. Perhaps the most perverse consequence of this dislocation is the blindness towards the very important lessons from advanced economies in minimizing poverty and protecting the poor from the negative consequences of markets and ruthless capitalism.

Importantly, dominant poverty knowledge avoids a very serious factual question. How feasible is it, after all, to eradicate poverty? At times of unprecedented wealth the abolition of severe poverty is less costly than the bailouts most western countries’ governments made of selected private sector companies during the financial crisis in 2008/2009. In Europe, bailouts to companies are accompanied by structural adjustment policies that have passed on the crises to average citizens, leading to increasing poverty and insecurity particularly for children and poor households (Ortiz and Cummings, 2012).

These broad characteristics of DPK are incompatible with the search for winwin strategies that address environmental issues, including climate change. DPK is antithetical to the framing and vision of human security proposed in this volume. If poverty is viewed through an economistic lens and action is based on neoliberal premises, then this diffuses rather than promotes collective responsibility, and negates rather than embraces social relations (Eriksen and Silva, 2009; O’Brien et al., 2010). Very importantly, employing a similar frame for environmental change will lead to viewing climate change along similar lines.

A rich history of problematizing development

The critique of dominant models of development and their negative social and environmental consequences is nothing new. In this section we summarize literature from three complementary fields: critical development studies, development ethics, and pioneers of alternative economic thinking to illustrate that there is a rich history of problematizing mainstream development and DPK. Climate change is a development issue. Today, we know climate change is the result of using fossil fuels to pursue unsustainable models of progress and development associated with unending economic growth, land and natural resources use, and mass consumption (IPCC, 2007; Parry, 2009; O’Brien et al., 2010; Dryzek et al., 2011). In order to build models of development that change direction and help address global environmental change and climate change we first and foremost have to revisit the critique of dominant models and the many alternatives that have been put forward. Equally important, fighting poverty does not require destructive growth. While levels of poverty are associated with limited consumption and absence of basic needs and opportunities, the relationship between poverty reduction and unending economic growth has always been contentious. This carbon-driven economic growth, promoted through capitalist economic liberalization policies worldwide, large-scale development projects such as the construction of dams, mines, or massive transformations in agricultural production through industrial agriculture schemes has led to unequal harms and benefits empirically documented in a large body of development research literature that needs to be revisited when addressing climate impacts. Just to take one leading theory, the capabilities approach, the message is very clear: prosperity is not the same as economic growth (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011).

The development models that have led to the climate crises are the same processes of rapid capitalist transformation identified by Karl Marx. As Karl Polanyi puts it in his brilliant book the Great Transformation, the emergence of the market economy means primarily one thing: the disembedding of economic action from nature and the social (Polanyi, 1944). While the term development is used to convey the planned social change coordinated by international and national development aid agencies that emerged after World War II, this obscures the fact that since the nineteenth century there have been competing views about the direction of socio-economic transformation (Cowen and Shenton, 1995). A particular view became successful and dominant: progress as the pathways of societies that are commercialized, individualized, industrialized and urbanized. What emerges is a system that creates poverty discursively and materially, while it perpetuates existing inequalities and depends on structural conditions that keep poor people and communities subsumed to the functioning of a world economy in the making and unmaking of the “third world” (Escobar, 1995). As Denis Goulet (1980) argued, development is a cruel choice, leading to winners and losers. The professionals of development, the aid agencies, act like one-eyed giants, asking poor people in the global south to follow certain development pathways while not seeing the negative consequences of such pathways (Goulet, 1980). Modernity led to dreamed lives for some, especially in colonizer countries, but much poverty existed and still exists within modernities, bringing “disenchantment, alienation and loss of meaning, and from concern for the vulnerable and suffering” (Gasper and St. Clair, 2010: 20). Some get gains and some pains, argues one of the first social scientists to populate the World Bank, Michael Cernea, referring to the socially and environmentally harmful consequences of large development projects such as building large dams, as the result of ignoring both people and nature (Cernea, 1985).

Decades of this purposeful development have led to a present pathway marked exactly by these two ills: massive inequalities and extensive environmental damage. Inequality, although very well documented, remains an externality in most processes of planning and social transformation and is a defining characteristic of contemporary globalization (Munck, 2004; Milanovik, 2007; Gills, 2008). Much of the critical literature on development and inequality has one common characteristic: it proposes the thesis that any plausible conception of what may constitute fair globalization and social transformation processes needs to address the power relations that produce and reproduce global poverty (St. Clair, 2006; 2007). Current data on poverty trends present a very sad picture. There are almost 1 billion hungry people on the planet, and a similar number lack suitable housing, access to safe water or to basic education. More than two billion lack access to sanitation and essential medicines and health care. Over 200 million children work for wages, and more than 1.6 billion people do not have access to electricity or any energy service (CROP, 2010). As Branko Milanovik (2007) argues, the 6.4 percent of global household income that has gone into expanding the share of the top tenth, would be sufficient to double all incomes for the bottom seven tenth of humankind.

Equally important, unending economic growth models of development have been the main cause of pervasive environmental degradation, ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss. While growth is often depicted as the driver for better environmental regulation and thus environmental quality, the so-called U-shaped curve linking more growth and more environmental protection is a theoretical construct rather than a “real fact.” Economic liberalization and other policies that promote gross national product growth are not substitutes for environmental policy (Arrow et al., 1995).There are limits to the carrying capacity of the planet, but these are not central to contemporary growth practices that presumably are the main driver of poverty reduction. Economic theory driving the modern project of prosperity has always treated the environment as a sink and a never-ending source of resources to be turned into products. There is a large body of environmental economics and alternative economic thinking that has warned against unending growth and its negative effects. In 1968, Ezra Mishan argued that the dream of unending economic prosperity and rising living standards was deeply dangerous because of its social and environmental costs. Mishan (1967) contended we may be heading toward chaotic environmental damage. Later, steady state economics, proposed by Herman Daly (1991), warned of the flaws in traditional economic theory for improperly valuing natural resources. Environmental economists such as Joan Martinez-Alier demonstrated how environmentalisms are numerous, and that an environmentalism for the poor requires valuation of natural systems and accounting of ecological debt to the poor (Martinez-Alier, 2002).

More recently a de-growth movement has developed in response to climate change impacts and widespread environmental degradation. The term de-growth was invented by the French economist Sergio Latouche, as part of his critique of dominant models of development social and environmental impacts (see http://www.degrowth.eu/). Recently Tim Jackson (2011) has argued for shifting gears in relation to unending growth by changing the ways we conceive of and practice economic transactions and investments. What we see emerging is a new conception of prosperity and progress that takes social and environmental consequences as an internal part of their definition. Amongst those alternatives, we must also add a new way of seeing the causes of poverty, who are the poor and what to do in order to eradicate poverty while protecting the natural environment through valuing differently. It is doable and feasible, we suggest, if power shifts were to enable such transitions to new development pathways. Together, these alternatives offer a way out of the vicious cycle of promoting destructive growth in the name of the poor.

Alternative perspectives on poverty: connecting human security and the climate crisis

A reframing of both poverty and climate change must be part of building alternatives visions that no longer view climate change as a threat to our ability to reduce poverty. Such visions do not present the current efforts to reduce poverty as an ideal state, as if we already were on the path towards a just world were it not for the threat of climate change. Alternative perspectives on poverty challenge this discourse and strengthen the possibility of alliances across critical fields of development studies, globalization studies and environmental economics. We propose a perspective more suited to an integrated, relational, agency-based and equitable joint framing of both challenges: poverty and the environment.

An alternative framing of poverty starts with the proposition that poverty occurs in all parts of the globe (both majority and minority worlds, or Global South and Global North) and poses questions about the interconnected global material and discursive dimensions of poverty processes in their relation to wealth and prosperity. Poverty, we argue, is best understood as relational, produced through material social relations and discursive processes in the context of specific histories, geographies and ecologies (O’Connor, 2001; Hickey, 2009; Mosse, 2010; Lawson, 2012). Poverty is produced by the changing political-economy of globalized capitalism across both majority and minority worlds. Ecological connections between human beings and the places they inhabit are key to understanding poverty and situating humans as part of their environment. The ways in which poverty is pictured and addressed in different places are connected: for example, how the poor are depicted in the majority world helps us to understand constructions of the poor and poverty policy in the minority world. And this is relevant also in relation to the current debate on poverty and climate change. For example, the presumption that those with more resources are less likely to be affected by climate and also that they will be more able to adapt, reinforces the distance between the poor and the well-off in the face of dangerous climate change. We need to rejoin this artificial dislocation between the poor and the non-poor, the vulnerable to climate and the non-vulnerable. A relational view focuses our attention on the interlinkages between the poor and non-poor, rather than eliding these interconnections.

We argue for work that addresses simultaneously the contradictions inherent in market-based approaches to poverty reduction as well as market responses to climate and global environmental change. This includes critiques of the extension of market relations into almost everything, and the implications of neo-liberal roll-backs in institutional involvements in poverty reduction (at various scales with different profiles in different places). We suggest that market-based approaches to poverty reduction are deeply political (despite their apolitical claims). DPK produces flawed subjects and flawed places through categorizing “the poor”; by discursively framing who is counted as deserving/undeserving, in their exclusion of care activities and relations, and in how the state is reframed as a neoliberal actor in policy decisions. By contrast, relational analyses of poverty focus attention on the co-production of poverty, attending to how people interpret and challenge both the category of poverty and processes producing impoverishment, and contest and negotiate poverty processes. On the one hand, we know the poor accommodate poverty through adaptive preferences (Sen, 1999). But people also seek to maintain dignity and civility rather than resisting either representations or material productions of poverty/inequality. Co-production also includes attention to how global actors engage in poverty polices, co-produce bureaucratic social orders and institutional power relations at the same time as they produce knowledge (St. Clair, 2006).

Finally, we argue for an ethical perspective and the treatment of poverty as a question of social and global justice, and for attention to the relations to and complementarities with solidarity, virtues, care, and social cohesion and the fundamental role that inequality plays in preventing just processes and outcomes. A relational approach to analyzing poverty can then be formed through including insights from development ethics and global justice; insights from critical care ethics, global social justice, and social inclusion. This includes consideration of special attachments and obligations (Deacon and Cohen, 2011; Haarstad and St. Clair, 2011; Lawson, 2012).

In summary, we argue for a social constructionist political-economy approach to understanding poverty. Poverty is produced through political, economic, and discursive/cultural mechanisms that are connected and recurrent across space and also (co)produced through human actions and places. To adequately address poverty in the context of climate and global environmental change crises, scholars must explore the simultaneity of material processes, the social constructions of poverty and how these depict the relations between poverty and climate change. This leads to placing the central concern on social, global and climate justice. In addition, it leads scholars to engage and co-produce knowledge with those named as poor as creative agents with capacity to define their actions and futures.

Conclusion: reframing poverty and prosperity

This chapter argues that global environmental change, poverty and prosperity are integrally related sets of processes that are linked to specific models of development and particular conceptions of progress. Past visions of social transformation have led to a world that has created prosperity for a few at the expense of the many and the planet. Reversing this trend requires rethinking transformative processes in a holistic way, where egalitarian societies and the health of the planet become central goals. Unlike the dominant poverty discourse and visions of development as unending growth and luxury consumption, the reframing we see in critical social science literature provides a point of departure that may lead not only to a more socially just and pro-poor discourse on environmental and climate change, but also to more feasible, empirically grounded and long-lasting solutions to these problems. There are four fundamental reasons for merging critical agendas for research relating poverty and climate change:

First, it is of fundamental importance to unsettle the DPK and to prevent its uncritical adoption by the rapidly emerging scholarship on the human dimensions of climate change and the worldwide search for easy win-win solutions to the dilemmas posed by climate change to existing poor people and communities. Such uncritical adoption of a discourse that has fundamentally not only failed to eradicate severe poverty or to protect people from vulnerability to poverty conditions, but has actively contributed to them, will lead to maladaptation and will be blind to the now documented negative impacts of mitigation strategies on poor communities. Also, the uncritical acceptance of poverty and development discourses will not encourage crucial self-reflection regarding how processes of production and consumption are linked with the dominant economic development paradigm, and are a primary cause of current climate crises. If we continue along this same path, mitigation will never be possible.

Second, we argue that in the same way that market-based approaches to solving poverty have failed to lead towards the idealized “outcomes” promised by the dream of modernity, we risk similar outcomes for market-based solutions to climate change.

Third, we argue that the reframing of global poverty as a matter of social justice and global solidarity is exactly what is needed in the reframing of climate change. There are no easy answers to what are complex global problems with uncertain outcomes. Precisely because of these characteristics, such problems call for protection, fairness, acceptance of responsibility, and equity.

Fourth, feasible and equitable solutions to both climate change and poverty may be crafted only when climate change and poverty are seen together, guided by solidarity and justice concerns, informed by political economy, linked to consumption and production, and within a joint framework that is critical of dominant discourses on development and prosperity.

It is by seeing both issues in an integral manner, as questions of agency and human action, as moral and ethical challenges, related to human beings with complex and often contradictory values and worldviews that a balanced solution may be found for both mitigation and adaptation. We argue such solutions lie in the capacity to transform the framing of both the causes and solutions to the interconnected crises of global poverty and climate change.

References

Alkire, S and Foster, J. (2011) ‘Understandings and misunderstandings of multidimensional poverty measurement’, Journal of Economic Inequality, 9 (2): 289–314.

Arrow, K., Bolin, B., Costanza, R., Dasgupta, P., Folke, C., Holling, C.S., Jansson, B., Levin, S., Maler, K., Perrings, C. and Pimentel, D. (1995) ‘Economic growth, carrying capacity and the environment’, Science, 268 (5210): 520–521.

Cowen, M-P. and Shenton Robert, W. (1995) ‘The invention of development’, in J. Crush (ed.) Power of Development, London: Routledge: 27–43.

Cernea, M. (1985) Putting People First: Sociological Variables in Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CROP (2010) ‘Status on global poverty-some statistics and sources’, Comparative Research Programme on Poverty, Policy Brief Series 1, 2010. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.crop.org/viewfile.aspx?id=208 (assessed 10 November 2012).

Daly, H. (1991) Steady State Economics, Washington, DC: Island Press.

Deacon, B. and Cohen, S. (2011) ‘From the global politics of poverty alleviation to the global politics of social solidarity’, Global Social Policy, 11 (3): 233–249.

Dryzek, J., Norgaard, R. and Scholsberg, D. (2011) Oxford Handbook on Climate and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Eriksen, S. and O’Brien, K. (2007) ‘Vulnerability, poverty and the need for sustainable adaptation measures’, Climate Policy, 7 (4): 337–352.

Eriksen, S. and Silva, J.A. (2009) ‘The vulnerability context of a savanna area in Mozambique: household drought coping strategies and responses to economic change’, Environmental Science & Policy, 12 (1), 33–52.

Escobar, A. (1994) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World Princeton, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gasper, D. and St. Clair, A.L. (eds) (2010) Development Ethics: A Reader, London: Ashgate.

GECHS (1999) Global Environmental Change and Human Security, GECHS Science Plan, Bonn: IHDP.

Goulet, D. (1980) ‘Development experts: the one eyed giants’, World Development, 8 (7/8): 481–489.

Gills, B. (2008) ‘The swinging of the pendulum: the global crisis and beyond’, Globalizations 5 (4): 513–522.

Haarstad, H. and A.L. St. Clair (2011) ‘Social policy and global poverty: beyond the residual paradigm?’, Global Social Policy, 11 (2–3): 214–219.

Hayes, T. and Persha, L. (2010) ‘Nesting local forestry initiatives: revisiting community forest management in a REDD+ world’, Forest Policy and Economics, 12 (8): 545–553.

Heltberg, R., Siegel, P.B. and Jorgensen, S.L. (2009) ‘Addressing human vulnerability to climate change: toward a “no-regrets” approach’, Global Environmental Change, 19 (1): 89–99.

Hickey, S. (2009) ‘Rethinking poverty analysis from the margins: insights from Northern Uganda’, Afriche e Oriente, 11 (2): 119–136.

IPCC (2007) Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007, M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson (eds) Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

IPCC (2012) Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, a Special Report of Working Groups I and II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, C.B. Field, V. Barros, T.F. Stocker, D. Qin, D.J. Dokken, K.L. Ebi, M.D. Mastrandrea, K.J. Mach, G.-K. Plattner, S.K. Allen, M. Tignor, and P.M. Midgley (eds), Cambridge, UK, and New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

Jackson, T. (2011) Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, London: Routledge.

Lawson, V. (2010) ‘Reshaping economic geography? Producing spaces of inclusive development, Economic Geography, 86 (4), 351–360.

Lawson, V. with the Middle Class Poverty Politics Research Group (2012) ‘De-centering poverty studies: middle class alliances and the social construction of poverty’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 33: 1–19.

Lohman, L. (2006) ‘Carbon trading: A critical conversation on climate change, privatization and power’, Development Dialogue, 48, Uppsala: The Dag Hammarskjöld Centre.

Marino, E. and Ribot, J. (2012) ‘Adding insult to injury: Climate change and the inequities of climate intervention’, Global Environmental Change, 22 (2): 323–328.

Martinez-Alier, J. (2002) Environmentalism of the Poor, A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, London: Edward Elgar.

McMichael, P. (2009) ‘Banking on agriculture: a review of the World Development Report 2008’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 9 (2): 235–246.

Milanovik, B. (2007) An even higher global inequality than previously thought: a note on global inequality calculations using the 2005 ICP results’, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series, Washington DC: World Bank.

Mishan, E. (1967/1993) The Cost of Economic Growth (revised edition in 1993), New York: Praeger.

Mosse, D. (2010) ‘A relational approach to durable poverty, inequality and power’, Journal of Development Studies, 46 (7): 1156–1178.

Munck, R. (2004) Globalization and Social Exclusion: A Transformationalist Perspective, London: Kumarian Press.

Nussbaum, M. (2011) Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

O’Brien, K.L., St. Clair, A. and Kristoffersen, B. (eds) (2010) Climate Change, Ethics, and Human Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

O’Connor, A. (2001) Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ortiz, I. and Cummings, M. (2011) ‘Global inequality: beyond the bottom billion – a rapid review of income distribution in 141 countries’, UNICEF Social and Economic Policy Working Paper. Online. Available HTTP: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1805046 (accessed 10 November 2012).

Ortiz, I. and Cummings, M. (2012) A Recovery for All: Rethinking Socio-economic Policies for Children and Poor Households, New York: UNICEF. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.unicef.org/socialpolicy/index_62107.html (accessed 10 November 2012).

Parry, M. (2009) ‘Climate change is a development issue, and only sustainable development can confront the challenge’, Climate and Development, 1 (1): 5–9.

Pogge, T. (2010) Politics and Usual: What Lies behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric, London: Polity Press.

Polanyi, K. (1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time, Chicago: Chicago Press.

Resnick, D., Tarp, F. and Thurlow, J. (2012) The Political Economy of Green Growth: Illustrations from Southern Africa, UNU-WIDER Research Paper, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).

Roy, A. (2010) Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, New York: Routledge.

Schneider, F., Kallisa, G. and Martinez-Alier, J. (2010) ‘Crisis or opportunity? Economic degrowth for social equity and ecological sustainability’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 18 (6): 511–518.

Schram, S. (2000) After Welfare: The Culture of Postindustrial Social Policy, New York: New York University Press.

Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom, New York: Knopf.

Stern, N. (2007) The Economics of Climate Change – The Stern Review, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skoufias, E., Rabassa, M., Olivieri, S. and Brahmbhatt, M. (2011) The Poverty Impacts of Climate Change, World Bank Policy Brief, Washington, DC: World Bank.

St. Clair, A.L. (2006) ‘Global poverty: the co-production of knowledge and politics’, Global Social Policy 6 (1): 57–77.

St. Clair, A.L. (2007) ‘A methodologically pragmatist approach to development ethics’, Journal of Global Ethics, 3 (2): 1–22.

St. Clair, A.L. (2010) ‘Global poverty and climate change: towards the responsibility to protect’, in K. O’Brien, A.L. St. Clair, and B. Kristoffersen (eds) Climate Change, Ethics and Human Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 180–198.

UNRISD (2010) Poverty Report: Combating Poverty and Inequality: Structural Change, Social Policy and Politics, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.unrisd.org/publications/cpi (accessed 15 August 2012).

UNRISD (2011) Green Economy and Sustainable Development: Bringing Back the Social Dimension, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.unrisd.org/events/greeneconomy (accessed 30 October 2012).