Ainsi, d’après les termes de notre formule, les théories qui recommandent, comme remède aux maux dont souffrent les sociétés actuelles, un développement plus considérable des institutions de charité et de prévoyance non seulement privées, mais publiques, ne sauraient être appelées socialistes quoique très souvent on les dénomme ainsi, tant pour les attaquer que pour les défendre. [...] Instituer des œuvres d’assistance à côté de la vie économique, ce n’est pas rattacher celle-ci à la vie publique. L’état de diffusion où se trouvent les fonctions industrielles et commerciales ne diminuent pas parce qu’on crée des caisses de secours pour adoucir le sort de ceux qui, temporairement ou pour toujours, ont cessé de remplir ces fonctions. Le socialisme est essentiellement une tendance à organiser; or la charité n’organise rien. Elle laisse en l’état, elle ne peut qu’atténuer les douleurs privées qu’engendre cette inorganisation.
ÉMILE DURKHEIM – Le socialisme – p. 52
Vers la fin de 1931 les plus aveugles durent reconnaître que des millions de gens souffraient et que la charité privée était tout à fait incapable de suffire à une tâche gigantesque.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS - Les Chantiers américains, p. 22
She did not believe in a local and sentimental pity. Nor did she believe that poverty could be cured by charity. It could only be cured by altering the conditions in which the poor lived, conditions can’t be altered until they are ascertained, and hence her belief in Commissions of Inquiry and note-taking, and questionnaires, and her ultimate conversion to socialism and state-control, and all that her parents detested.
E.M. FORSTER – Two Cheers for Democracy – p. 220
A society in which everybody had a right to basic security would address inequality directly. But in the globalisation era, so far, there has been a drift to a charity perspective, not a rights-based one. We are all urged to contribute, altruistically, to charities, to adopt a goat, fund an African child's schooling, and so on. Pity, as Bernard Shaw so memorably put it, is akin to contempt.
Deconstructing Development Discourse – Buzzwords and Fuzzwords. Edited by Andrea Cornwall and Deborah Eade – Oxfam GB 2010 – Chapter 5: Social protection – Guy Standing
Today, micro-credit has become a global debt-creating industry worth billions of dollars. It is favoured by aid agencies and aid-recipient governments alike and relieves the latter of the far less favoured responsibility of controlling markets and redistributing wealth, assets, rights to land, and access to resources which could generate longer-term solutions to poverty.
Deconstructing Development Discourse – Buzzwords and Fuzzwords. Edited by Andrea Cornwall and Deborah Eade – Oxfam GB 2010 – Chapter six – Globalisation – Shalmali Guttal
NGOisation leads to the transformation of a cause for social change into a project with a plan, a timetable, and a limited budget, which is 'owned' for reporting and used for the purposes of accountability vis-à-vis the funders. [...] they must demonstrate success if they are to maintain their funding. A corollary of the sydrome is a tendency to gloss over mistakes and to present the project as an unqualified success-story [...] If donors are driven by the logic of efficacy of their funds, then NGOs are driven by the imperatives of professionalism and delivery. [...] An industry of funding and projects has developed around issues related to democracy, peace building, and women's rights; democracy-brokers in Europe, North America, and Australia are kept busy writing proposals and bids to public bureaucracies fot their projects in the Arab world.
Deconstructing Development Discourse – Buzzwords and Fuzzwords. Edited by Andrea Cornwall and Deborah Eade – Oxfam GB 2010 – Chapter 18: NGOs: between buzzwords and social movements – Islah Jad
By having identified the nasty state as the culprit, the World Bank was not advocating a popular government, but rather creating a populist justification for the removal of the state from the economy and its substitution by the market.
Deconstructing Development Discourse – Buzzwords and Fuzzwords. Edited by Andrea Cornwall and Deborah Eade – Oxfam GB 2010 – Chapter eight – Participation – Pablo Alejandro Leal
I think that such philosophies are tricks for justifying the privileges of the holders of power [...]
BERTRAND RUSSEL – Power, p. 221
Thus liberation or empowerment of poor people in this rationale is not linked with political or state power. Rather, the implication is that empowerment is derived from liberation from an interventionist state, and that participation in free-market economics and their further enlistment into development projects will enable them to 'take fuller charge of their lives', and it this which is cast as inherently empowering.
Deconstructing Development Discourse – Buzzwords and Fuzzwords. Edited by Andrea Cornwall and Deborah Eade – Oxfam GB 2010 – Chapter eight – Participation – Pablo Alejandro Leal
This process of depoliticisation has been well documented in a series of critiques, culminating with Cooke and Kothar's (2001) Participation: The New Tyranny? [...] As Williams (2004:1) states:
If development is indeed an 'anti-politics machine', [...] participation provides a remarkably means of greasing its wheels.
Deconstructing Development Discourse – Buzzwords and Fuzzwords. Edited by Andrea Cornwall and Deborah Eade – Oxfam GB 2010 – Chapter eight – Participation – Pablo Alejandro Leal
[...] in being adressed solely as technical or philanthropic issues, poverty and inequality are effectively withdrawn from the public (political) arena and so from the proper domain of justice, equality, and citizenship, and reduced to a problem of ensuring minimum conditions for survival.
Deconstructing Development Discourse – Buzzwords and Fuzzwords. Edited by Andrea Cornwall and Deborah Eade – Oxfam GB 2010 – Chapter nine – Citizenship – Evelina Dagnini
Meanwhile, in keeping with the insidious dominance of the neo-liberal ideology and its consumerist core, we see the transition of empowerment out of the realm of societal and systematic change and into the individual domain – from a noun signifying shifts in social power to a verb signalling individual power, achievement, status. 'Empower yourself' screamed a billboard advertisement for jobs in yet another IT company in Bangalore, my home town, last year.
Deconstructing Development Discourse – Buzzwords and Fuzzwords. Edited by Andrea Cornwall and Deborah Eade – Oxfam GB 2010 – Chapter 10: Taking the power out of empowerment – Srilatha Batliwala