Business as Usual? The Global Political Economy of Childhood Poverty

New publication in our Young Lives Technical Note series.

Young Lives Technical Note 13. Business as Usual? The Global Political Economy of Childhood Poverty [PDF file 427 KB]
Jason Hart, October 2008

Summary:
This paper argues that poverty, in general, and childhood poverty, in particular, are the product of complex and evolving forces that, in many parts of the world, appear to be increasing in their reach and scale. Such forces are bound up with on-going processes of social change. Expanding current efforts – including the cancellation of international debt – may have some positive effects. However, in order to ensure the eradication of childhood poverty, much more than this will be needed.

This paper proceeds on the understanding that while the bifurcation of the world into ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ runs the risk of grossly oversimplifying many complex and evolving dynamics, it nevertheless remains important to consider childhood poverty in light of long-standing asymmetries of power. Such power relations – that retain a topographical dimension - continue to serve the interests of elites and nations in certain locations whilst marginalising, as a matter of course, millions of children and their families elsewhere.

The discussion is divided into four sections. In the first the notion of ‘political economy’ is explored and some of the limitations in this respect within the recent literature on childhood poverty are explained. Section two offers a view on how the construction of childhood as a social institution might be understood in light of the workings of political economy and how they intersect with ideology/culture. The third section reverses the perspective to explore the challenge of developing an approach to political economy that is mindful of children. The final section of the paper takes the key elements of the foregoing theoretical discussion and applies them in the articulation of an approach to exploration of childhood poverty that locates local experience in relation to global political economy. Social reproduction is the particular theme around which this aim is pursued.

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