Reflections on poor-led poverty abolition: a reply to Matthews, Pilapil, Igneski and Peeters

ABSTRACT

In this reply, I respond to issues raised by Matthews, Pilapil, Igneski and Peeters in their commentaries on Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements. They pose important definitional, conceptual, and normative questions and challenges. My response acknowledges that the diversity and fluidity of political activism by people in poverty complicates questions of political cooperation and solidarity – and makes the prospect of poor-led poverty abolition and social change seem dim. The normative arguments in support of centering the perspectives and aims of poor-led organizations and social movements, however, do not depend on the consistency or imminent success of these movements. If political theorists are to contribute to efforts to abolish the systems that perpetuate chronic poverty, they will need to see the social-political empowerment of people living in poverty – and the dismantling of systems of structural subordination and exploitation – as the broad remedy.

KEYWORDS:

• Poverty
• social movements
• political responsibility
• solidarity
• poor-led activism

Introduction

The normative arguments I make in this book are centrally informed by empirical research on poor-led organizations and social movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and by the statements and material produced by these groups and movements. This is a little unusual for a work in normative political philosophy, although less so nowadays than when I started the project. Today, the value of more grounded and engaged approaches to normative theorizing is well established (see especially Ackerly et al. 2021), even if there remains confusion and skepticism about such methodologies. I see the development and refinement of these grounded approaches to theory, and the growing disenchantment (including my own) with ‘applied’ moral and political philosophy (Wolff 2019), as signs that the alcyon days of ideal theory are over. While I did not adhere to all of the commitments central to the grounded and engaged normative theory approach (Ackerly et al. 2021) – for I did not do my own fieldwork – I wrote the book broadly in the spirit of grounded and engaged theorizing. The normative arguments I make about the need to see poverty as a political problem of structural subordination and exploitation, and to see people in poverty as agents, not mere subjects, of justice, reflect the analyses of the poor-led organizations and movements I discuss in the book. The importance of the empirical research to my arguments, and my claim that the organizations and movements of people living in poverty – typically assumed (by philosophers) to lack agency – should guide poverty abolition efforts, ensure that questions about both the empirical and the normative foundations of my arguments are sure to arise. In the first part of this reply, I take up questions relating to the conceptual and definitional challenges of poor-led political activism; in the second part, I address concerns that, in my view, arise from the anti-foundationalism of my normative approach.

Conceptual and definitional challenges

Sally Matthews, Renante D. Pilapil, Violetta Igneski, and Wouter Peeters have questions and concerns about how I conceptualize and defend the value of poor-led movements and groups. The expansiveness of my definition, and the moral minimalism of my argument for poor-led social change, admittedly generate numerous ‘what if’ and ‘what about’ concerns and counterfactuals. Matthews cautions that poor-led activism in global South contexts is more diverse, fluid, and unpredictable than my analysis assumes, with consequences for the practice of solidarity (by would-be allies). Igneski worries that organized poor-led groups may sometimes be unjust, including privileging some members’ interests and empowerment above those of others. And Pilapil doubts that my approach can credibly distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate poor-led social movements, including anti-democratic movements that use violent tactics to secure power for themselves.

It is true that I define poor-led social movements and groups broadly. I take my lead from Dr. Diana Mitlin, a leading scholar of urban poverty and development, who defines poor-led mobilization as ‘politicized collective activities of and for the poor,’ ranging from ‘formal organizations … to popular protest and networks that … link both organized and dispersed actors in processes of social mobilization’ (cited in Deveaux 2021, 17; Mitlin 2013, 47). This rarely means advocating for the rights of poor people everywhere. However, poor-led organizations and movements consist in people who join with similarly-placed others in order to secure livelihoods, seek justice, and defend their (social and human) rights: neighbors in an informal settlement, co-workers in the same sector, others similarly dispossessed from land ownership, and sometimes people who are their global counterpart (e.g. Slum Dwellers International and La Via Campesina). What of their political outlooks and aims? I stipulate that in their analyses of poverty and in their organizing, poor-led groups are usually ‘pro-poor’ in the sense that they center the perspectives and interests of people living in poverty and advocate for justice for them. Although the term ‘pro-poor’ may not resonate with political philosophers – some of whom have told me they find it to be an odd description – it is commonly used by poverty and development researchers to describe groups or movements that ‘denote agendas and policies that seek to augment the collective capabilities and political power of poor communities’ (Deveaux 2021, 10, n33). On my account, groups that are pro-poor seek to transform (at least some of) the structures that oppress and exploit people in poverty, sometimes whilst also seeking to meet their members’ needs for housing, food security, land, and other essentials.

This is quite an expansive definition of poor-led, pro-poor social movements – potentially too broad, as I will shortly discuss in connection with Pilapil’s concerns. Yet my inclusive definition may still fail to capture the fluidity and dynamism of political mobilization by people living in poverty. Matthews, who has studied and written extensively on NGOs and political activism in a development context, especially in West and Southern Africa (Matthews 2017), cautions that ‘poor-led’ is not an especially clear or stable characteristic of political organizations and movements involving people in poverty. As she explains, diverse ideologies, tactics, and agendas characterize poor-led organizing, and disagreements over goals and strategy within movements are common, leading to splintering and sectional interests. What’s more, the line between activists experiencing poverty and their pro-poor allies is often blurred, with intermittent collaboration. Matthews argues that these points are important because they bear directly on the question of solidarity and the feasibility of poor-led social change more generally. I am grateful for Matthews’ incisive analysis here and appreciate that she does not think this more nuanced and sober account forecloses the prospects for poor-led social change. Matthews is concerned that the distinction that I draw between ‘acting in solidarity with poor-led social organizations and illegitimately taking up a role of acting on behalf of poor people’ requires that it be possible to clearly demarcate between self-led grassroots poor groups and those (non-grassroots) NGOs comprised of nonpoor allies that merely advocate for the poor. This distinction, she argues, belies the fluid power dynamics of these groups and the reality of their shifting strategic interests and alliances. I am not sure that is right. Although it is true that I exclude international NGOs from my definition of poor-led groups and social movements – if they are staffed mainly by people without lived experience of poverty – some of the groups I use to illustrate effective and legitimate pro-poor activism are comprised of people experiencing relational poverty¹ working alongside nonpoor allies. The resource-focused groups affiliated with Slum Dwellers International (SDI) that enter into formal co-production agreements with local governments to produce housing and sanitation facilities are an example of this kind of collaboration between people living in poverty and their nonpoor allies (including poverty researchers and progressive development workers). As I write in Chapter 1, ‘working closely with an NGO, as the SDI model necessitates, does not make a shack/ slum dweller group any less authentic or legitimate’ (Deveaux 2021, 45). This rejoinder does not obviate Matthews’s observation, however, that activism and organizing by people experiencing poverty (especially in developing contexts) is fluid in ways that my discussion does not always capture.

My broad definition of pro-poor, poor-led groups and movements leads Pilapil to wonder whether I can justify excluding reactionary movements like India’s Hindu, far-right nationalist movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Do movements like the RSS not also aim at the political and social empowerment of people living in poverty, a core feature of the pro-poor agenda advanced by poor-led groups? Fair point. In the book, I exclude the RSS on the grounds that it is not pro-poor – that is, the RSS does not aim to empower people living in poverty so much as they seek to advance their own power, functioning as a highly sectarian, paramilitary organization for India’s BJP party. I am perhaps too quick to conclude that movements like the RSS reflect a mere minority of poor-led political groups, however (Deveaux 2021, 18). Citing Trevor Ngwane’s studies of organizing by residents of informal settlements in South Africa (Ngwane 2021), Matthews notes that poor-led activist groups are by no means consistently progressive and democratic, as my optimistic account often suggests; rather, they are ‘sometimes … reactionary, exclusionary or sexist and might only represent sectional interests or may be captured by external actors.’ Whether reactionary and exclusionary poor-led movements like the RSS are in a minority is important, for it bears on the feasibility of the broader poor-led approach to poverty reduction that I advocate: how large is the wave of politically progressive movements of people living in poverty globally, how effective have these movements actually been, and what is the likelihood that they will be able to have an impact on the structures and processes that perpetuate poverty at multiple geopolitical scales? Much will depend on the political climate and forces at work in the states where poor-led mobilization is happening – and this is a vast topic that I was only able to touch on in the book (mainly in my discussion of some of the eventual failures of the piqueteros movement in Argentina). I concede that my normative argument for a poor-led approach to abolishing poverty does depend upon genuinely pro-poor social movements being in the majority, not minority, of such movements.

Short of the challenge posed by extremist movements like RSS, my defense of poor-led social groups also raises questions about representation: how can we know that groups claiming to advocate for people living in poverty are genuinely speaking for those they claim to be representing? What if these groups in fact only advance the interests of some? Both Matthews and Igneski rightly observe that groups claiming to represent and empower a particular group of people living in poverty may not be equally concerned with the well-being and empowerment of all members of the group. A related problem noted by Matthews is that the anti-poverty organizations that come to the attention of would-be allies (including academic researchers) are more likely to be those receiving support and input from individuals and NGOs with resources (expertise in communications and website-building, for example).² These groups may not be inclusive of the very poorest in their communities, whose voices then remain unheard.

The concern that intra-group (and intra-family) power dynamics can readily lead some people’s well-being to be prioritized over others is of course a central reason why the Capability Approach [CA] stipulates that the individual, not family (or group or community), is the proper unit of moral concern. Wouter Peeters echoes this CA concern in his commentary when he asks whether my focus on collective empowerment and agency may lead us to ignore the well-being of some individuals. Peeters wonders whether the ‘normative collectivism’ of my approach ‘risks violating the principle that each person counts as a moral equal and should be respected as an end.’ By stipulating that the agency of the poor is only realized through collective organizing and action, do I not overlook the oppressive aspects of social movements that the (individual-focused) capabilities approach has consistently warned against in connection with families, communities, and societies?

These important questions – much-studied by social movement researchers, comparative politics scholars, and development studies researchers, amongst others – can only be answered contextually. It matters very much which groups are listened to and deemed to reflect genuinely pro-poor aims – and who is listened to within groups (and has decision-making power). But we can’t know that in advance of studying a particular group or movement; in the same way that we must guard against wishful thinking, we need to resist the negative generalizations of realpolitik thinking. In response to Peeters’ comment that he finds it a ‘highly problematic characteristic of this world that the claims of justice of people in poverty are only being considered if they organize themselves in (large) groups, if at all,’ I would say that organizing collectively is the only way that otherwise powerless people can have any hope of impacting the conditions that subordinate them. People living in conditions of structural and chronic poverty join forces with one another, organizing and mobilizing collectively, in order to resist their subordination and seek change. The term ‘collective capabilities’ may, in the end, be too ambiguous, so in many cases (as Peeters suggests) we could instead use the term ‘collective agency’.

A related but harder challenge is raised by Igneski: groups may pursue short-term interests (like food security or state-provided housing) at the expense of long-term, socially transformative goals, like democratizing governance structures in ways that would enfranchise politically marginalized poor communities. Certainly it is true that movements of the poor, like all social and political movements, are susceptible to internal power struggles, and to being captured by sectional interests. But the social movements and groups that I focus on in the book – landless rural poor movements (Brazil’s MST, the global network Via Campesina, Nijera Kori in Bangladesh), urban poor informal settlement groups (Slum Dwellers International and its affiliates in South Africa, India, Namibia, and Kenya), and urban worker movements (the piqueteros in Argentina, WIEGO in South Asia, and SEWA/the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India) – demonstrate that poor-led organizing can also be largely democratic, inclusive, and accountable to its members. Many of these groups (WIEGO, SEWA, Nijera Kori, and many of the slum dweller organizations) are led by women, and primarily made up of women members, for example. Rather than assume that poor-led groups are (or will inevitably become) internally discriminatory or unjust, we would do well to pay close attention to the empirical research on these movements.

Is a grounded normative theory approach too ‘theory lite’?

Social movements, like all forms of informal political engagement, can be helped or hindered by internal disagreements and divergent interests, not all of which can be democratically negotiated (Deveaux 2018). The diversity of the social movements of people experiencing poverty, and the question of which groups advance a genuinely pro-poor, poor-empowerment agenda, complicates the question of political solidarity, as Matthews in particular notes. Some groups may merely adopt a pro-poor rhetoric whilst excluding many people in poverty or else weaponizing their vulnerabilities (like the RSS). They may also act autocratically, not transparently or democratically – and so cannot be said to further the cause of poor political empowerment at all. How should would-be allies navigate these matters? My book doesn’t tackle these challenges head-on. I discuss (in the concluding chapter) ways that people with resources and capacity can support the work of poor-led social movements and organizations and explain why I think this support should reflect solidarity rather than aid or charity. But which groups to support? Pilapil asks how I can distinguish legitimate poor movements from illegitimate ones – such as those that seek to undermine democratic governments and may even use violence to do so – given the broadness of my definition of poor-led activism and my morally minimalist framework.

In my view, poor-led social movements or groups that act in ways that oppress their own members, and prevent or undermine their social and political empowerment, are not advancing a ‘pro-poor’ agenda. Pilapil notes that many effective actions aimed at challenging or transforming poverty-sustaining structures would not be classified as democratic. Here is where I part company with political realists: poor-led groups or movements that use highly anti-democratic tactics (silencing some members, rejecting democratic deliberation) and violence against marginalized people undermine the goal of emancipating poor people and are not worthy of support. A pro-poor agenda has certain nonnegotiable commitments: to seeking the empowerment and emancipation of people and communities living in poverty (enabling them to challenge their conditions of structural poverty); to treating people in poverty with dignity; and to respecting their human and civil rights. These values may be too prescriptive or not prescriptive enough, depending on one’s view. My hesitation (both in the book and here) in giving a robust account and defense of what I identify as core values of poor-led and pro-poor groups and movements is partly a response to calls for ‘intellectual humility’ by grounded and engaged theorists (Ackerly et al. 2021). Like them, I am disenchanted with the kind of normative theorizing that is detached from the lived experiences, perspectives, and claims of the people and movements that I am writing about, and so the account I give of a ‘pro-poor’ agenda closely tracks the groups and movements I discuss.

I am not sure whether this clarification of the normative commitments of pro-poor social change will satisfy Pilapil’s request for clearer moral criteria for distinguishing ‘legitimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ poor-led movements. He notes that groups claiming to be ‘pro-poor’ sometimes merge forces with leftist political parties, leading to co-optation. I agree that this pattern is a real danger, and my discussion of Argentina’s piqueteros and Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in some ways illustrates this. But Pilapil is concerned not only about the values and visions of groups, but their tactics: ‘Is the use of violence permitted in the whole process of politicizing poverty?’, he asks. Tactics like the seizure and protection of land and housing by poor activists frequently occasion violent retaliation by state, police, and corporations’ private security firms, as I discuss in the book. The moral permissibility (or not) of the use of violence by poor movements, either to attain their goals or in response to this retaliation, is an important question, but I don’t think philosophers (at least, philosophers who are not involved in these struggles) are well placed to answer it – nor do they have any special role to play.

Peeters, in his commentary, connects the demotion of the philosopher implied by my analysis to my use of a grounded and contextualist approach to theorizing. He is correct to do so. Like other critics of ideal theory, I think that the role of the theorist or philosopher is much more limited and humbler than proponents of applied philosophy working within an ideal theory frame have tended to assume.³ Peeters, however, worries about the ‘robustness’ of normative theorizing that leans into empirical data, particularly the pitfalls of ‘anecdotalism’ and ‘cherry-picking’. I think these concerns are more relevant to traditional forms of applied philosophy than to recent scholarship by grounded and engaged normative theorists. In contrast to the latter, applied philosophy is located within the frame of ideal theory, with all its attendant flaws; as Jonathan Wolff notes, applied philosophy (problematically) proceeds by ‘starting with a theory and looking for problems to which to apply to it’ (Wolff 2019, 17). Political theorists who take a grounded and engaged approach, however, have developed guidelines for doing empirically-grounded theorizing that directly address these pitfalls. In an important article that appeared just as I was completing final revisions on my book, several leading grounded normative theorists propose four methodological commitments that they argue characterize this emerging approach (Ackerly et al. 2021). These are: (1) comprehensiveness in methods and/or subjects or groups studied (in order to ‘deepen the range of insights, claims, interests, and actors they bring to bear on arguments in normative political theory’); (2) ‘recursivity’ i.e. ‘normative claims are developed and revised through ongoing and accountable engagement with empirical data, and with empirical contexts and actors in qualitative field work’; (3) ‘attentiveness to epistemological inclusion’; and (4) ‘epistemic accountability’ if doing field research, for example, accountability ‘to ideas and persons disadvantaged in political struggles against exploitation, exclusion, oppression, and domination’ (Ackerly et al. 2021, 5). These commitments respond directly to Peeters’ objections, in my view. As I write in the introductory chapter to my book, I endorse these commitments whilst acknowledging that, not having done my own fieldwork, I have fallen short of these (especially the last two). All of this is to say, Peeters’ concerns about empirically-informed theorizing miss their mark if he has in mind the approach developed by grounded and engaged normative theorists. This is not to say that I have avoided all cherry-picking – or wishful thinking/excessive optimism, as Matthews and Pilapil suggest – but I did take care to select a diverse range of poor-led groups and movements, in different hemispheres, and to explore the limitations and failures of some of these.

Many of my interlocutors over the years have expressed the concern that the poor-led approach I advocate somehow absolves the nonpoor from their responsibilities.⁴ In her commentary, Igneski wonders if such absolution might be an unintended ‘implication of [Deveaux’s argument] that discounts causation and capacity as grounds of moral duty.’ Poor-led social change centers the agency, perspectives, justice claims, goals, and strategies of poor social movements; agents in the global North are not assumed to be the primary agents of justice. I argue that people living in poverty have insights and interests that make their contributions to poverty abolition strategies indispensable. But even more than this, poverty is a form of relational subordination, and the poor have a right to say what they need and want to see change. I share Igneski’s desire to see a massive redistribution of resources from those with means (especially the wealthy) to those who cannot even meet their basic needs. But consequentialist, virtue ethical, and deontological approaches have consistently neglected not only the epistemically privileged vantage point of people in poverty and failed to recognize them as agents of justice but denied them a political role in seeking transformative justice.

I agree with Igneski that we can recognize and support the collective agency of people living in poverty whilst also holding the nonpoor accountable for doing what they can to reduce poverty. But arguments from moral obligation too often ignore the power: the reality that the global systems that undergird poverty are intentional, not accidental; that powerful people and collective agents spend much time and money resisting change to those systems; and that the nonpoor/affluent in the global North and South benefit from systems of social and economic exploitation, extraction, and dispossession. The more I understand this, the less benefit I see to clarifying their moral duties vis à vis poverty. In chapter six, I nevertheless make the case for a political responsibility for solidarity with poor-led social movements, discussing several practical ways that they can (individually or collectively) dispatch this duty. Igneski has more faith in the ‘role of moral argument’ than I do; however, she wants to retain the language of moral duty, and for causation and capacity to count: ‘the affluent [may] have to take on a greater burden due to their increased capacity and their disproportionate role in the supporting and benefiting from unjust institutions.’ She also remains committed to a broadly Kantian approach to the problem of poverty, which requires that particular agents be assigned specific duties in relation to poverty (though with a wider view of both obligations and agents; see Igneski 2023). By contrast, I am skeptical about the impact of appeals to moral duty on entrenched systems of injustice. In foregrounding the goal of poor social and political emancipation and affirming the right of the poor to determine what that looks like, the moral-duties-of-the-affluent framing is necessarily revealed to be problematic. That is why I emphasize the political responsibility of the affluent/nonpoor to support and act in solidarity with poor-led social movements. Still, I concur with Igneski’s point that we must not lose sight of the nonpoor/affluent’s backward-looking [causal] responsibility for structures and systems that sustain poverty.

Finally, adjacent to the worry that centering the agency of poor movements might draw attention away from what the nonpoor or affluent owe and ought to do (to reduce poverty) is the concern that people living in poverty might somehow be thought to be responsible for leading politically transformative poverty reduction. After all, I claim that they are uniquely placed within the historical epoch of exploitative late-capitalism, and epistemically privileged in the sense of having insights about what relations and structures render them poor. When people in poverty organize collectively, they can develop the requisite political consciousness and capabilities to push for progressive, even radical, poverty solutions. Despite this, it is emphatically not my view that people living in poverty are morally obligated to engage in activism aimed at transforming poverty structures. Not only is the ‘moral duties’ framing alien to my approach, but more practically, people struggling to survive and to keep their families fed face myriad disincentives and obstacles to political mobilization, as Pilapil notes. (In Chapter Six, I discuss very specific contexts in which people living in poverty may have a responsibility to support proximate others organizing against those structures – depending, of course, on their capability). People experiencing chronic poverty do not bear any responsibility, in the causal sense, for the global inequalities past and present that undergird poverty: exploitative labor chains, extractive industries, legacies of colonial plunder, transatlantic slavery, and land dispossession.

Conclusion

If it turns out that poor-led movements across the globe are far more politically unpredictable than my analysis recognizes, or the forces that resist and oppose them are too formidable, then the prospects for solidarity with those movements (on the part of would-be allies) are dim. Without the capacity to build regional and global solidarity networks between poor-led movements and allies, it is hard to see how antipoverty activists could mount an effective challenge to the social and economic structures and processes that underpin the poverty and the domination of poor people globally. Poor-led poverty reduction is not likely to get off the ground anytime soon (at least not on a large scale) – and certainly that was not my claim. But I have tried to make the case that it is vital (from the standpoint of justice) to learn from poor-led movements and groups that have a track record of supporting the empowerment and agency of poor communities.

I don’t think political philosophers/theorists have a privileged role in any of this. Writing as a theorist, I have tried to show how we might support and amplify the work of poor-led social movements by articulating a different vision of political responsibility, grounded in solidarity with poor-led social movements. I also tried to help others envision what a poor-led approach to poverty abolition looks like, in contrast to the dominant models of poverty reduction advanced within political philosophy/theory. My reluctance to appeal to substantive moral principles and values (e.g. equality, democratic legitimacy) in my role as a theorist admittedly leads to some inconsistencies and ambiguities. Am I smuggling in values I haven’t properly defended, like democratic legitimacy? Do I rule out supporting poor movements that resort to violent tactics in their struggles? I am grateful to Matthews, Pilapil, Igneski and Peeters for highlighting these and other normative and practical tensions in my argument for poor-led social change.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Canada Research Chairs Program (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada).

Notes on contributors

Monique Deveaux

Monique Deveaux has held the Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Ethics & Global Social Change at the University of Guelph since 2010, where she is also Professor of Philosophy. She has authored or co-edited books on multiculturalism, exploitation, and the thought of Onora O’Neill. She is an editor for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Grounded and Engaged Normative Theory.

Notes

1 By ‘relational poverty’ I mean not only needs deprivation, but subordination and/or and exploitation within social structures and relations of domination.

2 Brooke Ackerly also makes this point in a commentary on my book, in which she notes that relying on secondary sources (as opposed to doing one’s own fieldwork) has limitations: ‘only some groups gain the recognition and visibility necessary to be studied.’ See Ackerly 2023, 32.

3 Jonathan Wolff, for example, concludes that it is a ‘myth’ that ‘the philosopher [has] a distinctive, even privileged role in the policy process, as the formulator of the theory that provides a moral foundation for public policy.’ He contrasts this hubristic model of the philosopher applying theory to policy problems with that of the ‘engaged philosopher,’ whose role is limited to identifying ‘relevant values, in the context of a problem, current facts, past history, and contemporary alternatives.’ See Wolff 2019, 23.

4 I use the term ‘nonpoor’ in order to include all people – whether living in low-, middle-, and high-income countries – whose daily lives are not shaped by poverty. This term still isn’t adequate as it doesn’t capture the relational nature of poverty, or the fact that many people move in and out of poverty.