Central to Agenda 2030 in the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) crusade is the elimination of poverty, itself requiring sustainability of sorts across several frontiers, from such basics as food security, health, education, and gender-equality to such resources as water, forests, energy, economic growth, and infrastructure, among others. Accordingly, central to the Ninth South Asia Economic Summit (SAES) gathering, hosted by Dhaka's Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), was to engage the brightest of minds and most active among policy-makers and plenipotentiaries in the region to parley about extant problems, evolving plans, and future pathways to some very specific 2030 goals. In similar vein, central to the region at stake, South Asia, is the depth and breadth of its poverty: half-a-billion affected people out of the world's seven-plus billion total population (that, too, in a region that almost one-and-a-half billion people call home), and where "chronic" poverty and "serious" hunger are not only among the world's worst (CPD, "Reimagining South Asian Economy," this newspaper, October 15, 2016, p. 13), but also out-scaled only by human follies, like political deadlocks.
Though the "re-imagination" sought and encouraged in the conference was timely and well-intentioned, eliciting, as it did, probing viewpoints and exchanges, its underlying, unwitting problem may have been poverty of a different kind: poverty of representation. Top-notch scholars, high-ranking officials, legislators, diplomats, and innumerable think-tank and academic representatives presented and deliberated about an issue they could not have personally experienced, since "describing" poverty and "prescribing" solutions are not the same as actually "tasting" it personally at or below the margin. Rather than an exclusively top-down approach to a lowest-tiered problem, any representational admixture that includes some bottom-up experiences, viewpoints, and pathways may conceivably have shed more light as to how to dissolve stumbling blocks and promote the "inclusiveness" and "connectivity" that the conference did not fall short of reiterating. How, for example, can those half-billion marginalised people claim "connectivity" across national boundaries, as is so easy for their top-echelon brethrens to do, when even within their own national boundaries, social, economic, and political strictures prevent the very intermingling necessary for a peaceful elimination of poverty?
True, many poverty-alleviation programmes in, for example, developed countries have come from the top, and oftentimes only in a centralised location, like a country's capital city, or university, or think-tank. Can all the information and instruments necessary for poverty-alleviation be mobilised? Yet, South Asia remains notorious for not having commensurate agencies representing the marginalised as many developed regions boast: peasants, farmers, minorities, low-skilled workers, and migrants cry for agency representation so they can feel more comfortable in ventilating both their frustration and aspiration; and the few that we do have, such as for women, remain rather privileged or constrained from translating expectations into realities. Poverty shutters empowerment windows; but without empowerment, poverty deepens. Theoretical discourses typically replace real-life vicious cycles with virtuous counterparts.Â
The dilemma is not purely South Asian: even the U.N. SDG manifesto clearly accents that top-down approach, with various countries hardening or softening that posture to their own local predilections and socio-cultural or political economic inheritances/propensities. Yet, the bottom-line still remains that a Bangladesh opening the door through a conference invitation, if not an intellectual or policy-making breakthrough in itself, would at least circulate fresh perspectives on problems that are neither owned by the upper social echelons, nor rent to remedy without unlocking the chains of the disempowered. Registering that ever-elusive, proud win-win outcome in any society is possible when "all" get on board.
Yet, in a region still famous for its unresolved patron-client social strictures (the "shahibs" or "mem-shahibs" versus the "chaprasis" or "chakors"), low-wage structures (like RMG workers slaving away so the country can move up to a middle-income status), minorities, migrants, and refugees, it might be very refreshing to hear how poverty is interpreted where it resides, more so how their own pathways out of it compare with their better-off urban/international counterparts. A "Plan B" approach to Agenda 2030 might emerge that could not have been forged in any ivory-tower or policy-making pantheon, or by international conventions that SAES, SDG, and CPD gatekeepers resort to. If the end-product is to be warmly embraced by all, from the top-echelon to the bottom, and across every extant boundaries in South Asia, then across-the-board planning and participation may help more than any hand-me-down gesture. This would chip into the "connectivity" gaps with other strata within the same country, not to mention across the national boundaries.
At the broadest level, a more representative conference would help soften the patron-client divide wherefrom inequality gets forever institutionalised: putting a top-down approach against bottom-up representatives not only evokes the democracy all South Asian countries claim they have, but also feeds that empowerment instinct that sometimes still haunts the upwardly-mobile servant, RMG-worker, peasant, minority, and, most of all, woman. Perhaps the key word may be empowerment: equality becomes empty without empowerment. Boosting empowerment through representation would have enormously successful individual and institutional consequences by shaking inequality and, thereby, the structures of poverty. Loaded as the conference was with plans of how to eliminate poverty, more attention to dissecting what poverty actually is would have been helpful, particularly by its very victims.
Many speakers went part of the way, in fact, by adopting pro-poor positions. Pushing that momentum until the "poor" can speak for themselves one day ought to be the mission in this case. Indrajit Aponsu, an Economics Senior Lecturer from Sri Lanka's University of Colombo, even earned the "Grassroots Man" sobriquet at the conference for making this same point. That, too, needs cultivating so that grassroots groups join the awfully important discussions of the future of the planet as we know it today with more force than hitherto. It was heartening to hear the Dutch Ambassador, Leoni Margaretha Cuelenaere, and the U.N.D.P. Bangladesh Country Director, Nick Beresford, push the "leave no one behind" slogan, but if someone actually left behind in society personally appeared on the dais or at the conference podium, the crowd might have glimpsed the "real" poverty, rather than the abstraction of it, and perhaps become more energised to do something extra concrete about it (and policy-makers, likewise, perhaps more enriched with "food-for-thought" than gestures for the sake of gesturing).Â
Similarly, with the "green" cause (so pivotal to the SDG mission), with Dr. Jagdish Chandra Pokharel of the Nepal Institute of Urban and Regional Studies and Dr. Sultan Hafeeez Rahman from our own BRAC Institute of Governance and Development not only pitching it, but also pointing out how a private-sector usurpation of that mission might jeopardise the social-base and thwart the growth of "social responsibility." Again, a low-tiered/rural "green" representative rather than top-notch urban counterparts might have exposed more ground-level nitty-gritty details than can be fully captured, let alone prioritised, at the top. In fact, Dr. Nagesh Kumar from the UNESCAP South and South-west Office in New Delhi even proposed "green taxes," for example, to meet the staggering $2.5 trillion needed for uplifting the social sector just in India alone (and necessitating an equally stupendous 10-20 per cent of the GDP). Dr. Kumar alerted us as to why the "macro" level approach to the task may not be enough to fulfil Agenda 2030 goals.
Once invited from the shadows as guests, all of the above grassroots representatives, disenfranchised individuals and groups, and citizens who feel that this world is just passing them by without their input may shed perhaps the critical light on uplifting their own welfare along certain dimensions that professionals with all their training might still not have fully captured. If inviting them may be revolutionary, hopefully we have the stomach to handle that. At stake is something more pivotal: fighting against time (not to mention resources, stumbling blocks, and embedded practices and institutions), the SDG mission may run out of options if what was "re-imagined" if this game-changing SDG Agenda 2030 fails the litmus test of uplifting the half-billion impoverished South Asians without hearing their voice. Damages to society, with its values, institutions, and relationships, would be far higher than even with abject poverty; and that is something we may not have the stomach for.
Dr. Imtiaz A. Hussain is Professor & Head of the newly-built Department of Global Studies & Governance at Independent University, Bangladesh.
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SAES conference, SDGs, South Asian poverty: The uninvited guest
Imtiaz A. Hussain | Published: October 31, 2016 19:17:34 | Updated: October 22, 2017 14:32:46
SAES conference, SDGs, South Asian poverty: The uninvited guest
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