SDG 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere

Abstract

When we think of poverty reduction and development, we assume that these have always been inextricably linked. This is not the case. A focus on the problem of poverty was a relatively late entrant onto the development agenda. At the birth of the development age, in the decades following the Second World War, the emphasis of development was very much on states and economies. The dominant frameworks of development at the time (modernisation theory and the dependency critique), while differing in their analysis of the causes of underdevelopment, focused on the need to modernise and industrialise, with economic growth viewed as a key indicator of development success. This growth focus continued as the neoliberal counterrevolution in development economics took hold in the 1970s, particularly as expressed through the mechanism of structural adjustment, though emphasis shifted from the role of states to the role of global markets and the private sector. Insofar as poverty reduction was considered in these growth-focused models, it was seen as an incidental outcome: poverty, conceived largely in terms of a lack of income, was a problem that economic growth would rectify.