Building a case against economic development

Although development is widely held to be the solution to poverty in the Third World, a case can be made that it is a part of the problem. It is commonly believed that development eradicates poverty through increased production of goods and services, but the past history of that activity also contains an unacknowledged history of socially-constructed scarcity. Poverty is a form of development-induced scarcity caused by the playing out of production relations located within a nexus of interacting technical, social, political, cultural, ecological, and academic relations. In that sense poverty is caused by multiple forces acting within a discursive materialist formation. We have used an analytical framework called the nexus of production relations to elucidate these ideas. This framework also suggests that the opportunities available to the poor for meeting their needs are far more varied and numerous than theories of economic development would have us believe.