Abstract
This article criticizes recent Bottom (or, Base) of the Pyramid (BoP) approaches for ‘cancelling out politics’ by obscuring unequal power relations at different societal levels and painting an optimistic picture of win-win outcomes that will make (some of) the world’s biggest corporations richer while simultaneously adding a few crucial pennies to the pockets of the poor. The article is thus positioned within a growing stream of literature critical of BoP ideas, but it goes further than existing critiques by arguing that the current BoP discourse serves an important ideological function for global capital, specifically producing a discursive depoliticization of its corporate interventions in the lives of the world’s poor. We argue that the poverty-reduction outcome of a BoP venture is contingent on its practice on the ground, which will inevitably be shaped by local and global power relations. In particular, we point to three cultural-political issues overlooked by the BoP discourse, which are vital in understanding the practice of business ventures at the BoP: adverse power relationships within poor communities; social-epistemological hierarchies between the poor and outsiders who administer poverty-reduction interventions; and local vulnerabilities induced by global currents in products, services, information and ideologies.
Keywords
Recent business school writing on the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) makes the grand claim that Trans-National Corporations (TNCs) can eradicate global poverty by 2015. And they can reach this target while making a handsome profit, by selling their innovative products to the billions of poor around the world or by partnering with the latters as ‘co-producers’. Naturally, this win-win BoP proposition is posited as a genuine opportunity for firms to ‘do well by doing good’. The BoP proposition thus echoes and hopes to extend earlier efforts to help the poor using Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) schemes that also contribute to a ‘firm’s financial bottom line’ (Newell and Frynas, 2007: 670). Just like the rhetoric of CSR has attempted to provide ‘social’ legitimacy to further corporate accumulation and expropriation, the latest BoP discourse has sidelined decades’ worth of controversial experience with the role of private business in development (Banerjee, 2007; Prieto-Carrón et al, 2006; also see Madeley, 2008). Even in development agency circles (see for example, UNCPSD, 2004; and UNDP, 2008), this newfound role for private business in poverty eradication has gradually supplanted the view that large firms, in carrying out their ‘business-as-usual’ activities, can actually exacerbate poverty e.g. through adverse incorporation of poor producers into global markets, dispossession of land for mineral resource extraction, and fuelling corruption (see Banerjee, 2000; McCarthy, 2010; Prieto-Carrón et al., 2006: 980).
This convergence of corporate interest and current development thinking does not come as a surprise if one situates it in the historical shift toward neoliberalism unfolding in the last three decades. Under neoliberalism, poor country governments, often following advice provided by experts from the World Bank and other development agencies, have scaled back the state’s role as regulator of markets and its responsibility of securing essential services, such as healthcare, education, sanitation and water, for those in need. And with this, the burden of securing one’s livelihood and accessing essential services (by paying user fees) has been squarely placed on the shoulders of individual households. The faith in neoliberalism is undergirded by economic theory which positions deregulated markets as ‘efficient’ and thus necessary for generating economic growth which in turn leads to poverty reduction. This ‘economism forbids responsibility and mobilization by cancelling out politics’ while giving ‘itself the air of a message of liberation, through a whole series of lexical tricks around the idea of freedom, liberation, deregulation etc’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 50). The BoP proposition is such a new ‘message of liberation’ and this time sent directly to the doors of the world’s poor—all they need to do to be liberated is consume (or co-produce) the fruits of the global market. However, like many other promises of utopia, the neoliberal BoP proposition is a discursive curtain that hides a world of unequal power relations in its folds while ‘adding its own—specifically symbolic—force to those power relations’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 95).
In this article, we criticize recent BoP literature for ‘cancelling out politics’ by obscuring unequal power relations at different societal levels and in the process, painting a rosy picture of win-win outcomes that will make (some of) the world’s richest corporations richer and simultaneously add a few crucial pennies to the pockets of the poor. We argue that precisely these local and global power relations, by shaping the practice of any BoP ventures on the ground, will determine their outcomes in terms of reduction of poverty (or, its exacerbation). Thus, while this article is positioned within a growing stream of literature critical of Prahalad’s and Hart’s original BoP ideas (e.g. Bendell, 2005; Jaiswal, 2007; Jenkins, 2005; Jose, 2006; Karnani, 2007), it goes further than these critiques by arguing that the current BoP discourse serves an important ideological function for global capital, specifically producing a discursive depoliticization of its corporate interventions in the lives of the world’s poor. Moreover, the BoP discourse is unethical in holding out untested, if not utterly false, promises while sidelining a whole history of political struggles that have marked many poor communities’ previous encounters with large corporations (see Banerjee, 2007 and Madeley, 2008 for some examples).
To achieve its aims, the article adopts a broad political-economic perspective that views poor communities not simply as essentialized stakeholders, by ascribing an ‘authentic’ homogeneized essence to all community members, but rather as complexes of heterogeneous identities in which legitimacy is afforded to only some voices and not others. Based on existing studies in the anthropology of development, it also highlights the epistemological and social hierarchies that are likely to define any participatory partnerships formed between TNCs, NGOs and the poor as part of a BoP venture. And thirdly, it attempts to move beyond the micro-complexities to expose the material and ideological links of local communities with the global/national context that may afford opportunities to some community members while engendering vulnerability for others. In developing this critique, the article does not intend to devise strategies for action on part of the dominated or build a new theory of subaltern resistance. Instead, by pointing to occlusions in an existing discourse, it strives to define a space for context- and agency-specific narratives of social practices in everyday lives of the poor.
The article is structured as follows. In the following section, we briefly review the BoP approach, distinguishing between early ‘top-down’ views that emphasized the poor in their role as latent consumers who are presently underserved, and more recent thinking that hones in on participatory co-creation of innovations and markets. At this point we encounter the BoP proponents’ occlusion of the politics of partnership and participation processes. The subsequent section is an in-depth discussion of the practice of ‘pro-poor’ participatory development, illustrated with examples from the Indian rural scene. It is divided into three parts, each of which highlights a different sub-field within which these complexities are played out: heterogeneity within local communities; interactions between the communities and outsider-interveners; and issues arising from the embeddedness of local communities in broader national and global spheres. In the final section, we provide some conclusions and implications for future work.
Race to the base: poverty and the corporation
Although the BoP approach is unable to define what it means to be poor (even in terms of income alone, see Newell and Frynas, 2007: 670), the combined pursuit of corporate profits and widespread poverty eradication is claimed to be possible because (a) there is much latent collective purchasing power at the BoP, and private corporations can bring prosperity to the poor by selling them products and services; (b) local poor communities have great economic potential that can be nurtured by TNCs through co-creation of innovations. The early BoP literature (up to around 2005, henceforth called BoP 1) emphasized the first point, whereas the later BoP literature (referred to as BoP 2) focuses on the second.
BoP 1: the consuming poor
In BoP 1, the big challenge for corporations is to mobilize the poor’s capacity to consume by working on three aspects: affordability, access and availability (Prahalad, 2004). Examples include single-serving packages of consumption goods such as laundry soap and tea (increasing affordability through cash flow-smoothing), observing late opening hours (to facilitate access to poor people who cannot pre-date or postpone their buying decisions), and setting up franchise-style rural distribution channels for modern consumer products like shampoos and body lotions (to increase availability and choice in remote areas). The BoP 1 approach is largely top-down and places heavy emphasis on deriving profits from selling to the poor (Sprague, 2008: 89). It has been criticized on a number of counts, which have been elaborated elsewhere (see Landrum, 2007, for an overview). Only the points most salient for the purpose of the present article need a brief mention here.
First, in extant literature there is a serious lack of empirical support for the win-win proposition: many early BoP experiments such as the Philips health care and stove projects in India and Nike’s World Shoe project in China did not produce the profits or the poverty-reduction impacts they were meant to (Simanis et al., 2008). In fact, many TNC-led ventures were not even aimed at the poorest (thus limiting their scope for poverty reduction): for instance Philips India’s rural health project DISHA targeted people with incomes ranging from $1000 to $2000 per annum (Kasturi Rangan et al., 2007), and the Mexican Cemex-operated Patrimonio Hoy programme, where repayment requirements by participants were about $1.3 per day—an unaffordable proposition for those below the poverty line (Jenkins, 2005; Karnani, 2007). 1
Secondly, from the poverty-alleviation perspective, critics have seriously doubted the ability of corporations to raise people’s living standards by selling new products or services to them (e.g. Bendell, 2005; Jaiswal, 2007; Jenkins, 2005; Jose, 2006; Karnani, 2007; Walsh et al., 2005; Zachary, 2005). In fact, the BoP literature lacks an understanding of the mechanisms through which TNCs’ BoP strategies affect socio-economic development (Walsh et al., 2005). Studies have criticized ideas such as single serving sachets, which often create new environmental problems and are no cheaper than equivalent goods in larger packages. Corporations using sophisticated marketing tactics can also deceive poor people into believing that they are better off by using glamorous products such as branded lotions and skin creams that are in fact expensive substitutes for older products prepared and supplied by local producers. For example, in the case of the hyped Hindustan Unilever (HLL) project Shakti, ‘the challenge was to change long entrenched behaviours and shift consumers from commodities to brands. For the HLL shampoo brand Clinic Plus, the challenge was to create dissonance among users of mud, natural herbs, and low-cost local shampoos’ (Sinha et al., 2007). This smacks of exploitation and manipulation of ill-informed people, which is ethically problematic (Karnani, 2007). Even more problematic is the fact that some of these schemes were co-funded by public bodies (Seelos and Mair, 2006). The Shakti project was co-funded by the World Health Organisation to promote good hygiene practices. Interestingly, the project was no great success from the business point of view either. High turnover by the recruited sales ladies, who found their work insufficiently rewarded, has plagued the programme since its inception (Simanis et al., 2008).
But the basic issue at stake goes beyond this. Can poor people escape chronic poverty through better access to a wide range of cheap, high-quality products and services? There is essentially no evidence to support this product-centric (and technocratic) perspective on poverty reduction. Such a view ignores a large number of studies that have explored the nature of poverty and called for viewing it as a social-relational phenomenon intricately tied in with social exclusion and durable inequalities of class, race and gender, which shape economic outcomes by determining who is able to access labour markets, and which voices are registered as legitimate in participatory development projects, rather than simply equating poverty to a deficiency of income or lack of access to commodities (see for example, de Haan, 2001; Mosse, 2010; Walton, 2011). As noted by Edwards (2008: 37),
… it is perfectly possible to use the market to extend access to useful goods and services … [but] few of these efforts have any substantial, long-term, broad-based impact on social transformation. … The reason is pretty obvious: systemic change involves social movements, politics and the state, which these experiments generally ignore.
On the income front, many BoP 1 critics have pointed out that for poverty reduction to occur, the poor must be enabled to increase their productive capacity and earning power (Jaiswal, 2007; Karnani, 2007; Kasturi Rangan et al., 2007; Zachary, 2005). The critics’ argument is that poverty can be addressed only if attempts to raise consumption are coupled with efforts to boost local production and income generation. 2 But here the critics, by claiming that the poor are poor because their own productivity is low, fail to acknowledge any sociocultural structures or hierarchies (such as the exclusions produced by gender, race and caste) that may work against poor peoples’ efforts to increase their (labour) productivity in such a way that it leads to better living standards for them. Thus, through the discursive separation of the economic from the non-economic (social, cultural), and ignoring that poverty is a relational phenomenon, both the causes and the proposed solutions of poverty are reduced to the level of the individual. And with this burden on the individual, the critics fail to effectively challenge the false ‘message of liberation’ built into the BoP proposition and implicitly end up endorsing the assumptions of neoliberalism.
In light of the widespread criticism, later BoP discourse has shifted away from the top-down sales-focused business concept towards approaches that require active engagement with the poor. These are inspired by insights from community and participatory development approaches (e.g. Chambers, 1983), which take a more ‘bottom-up’ view of innovation as societally-embedded learning and capacity-building processes that must be driven by poor peoples’ needs as perceived by them. Thus, (some) BoP practitioners are turning to bottom-up approaches of co-creation of innovative solutions to address poverty through interactive learning in close dialogue and partnership with the poor and other stakeholders. The new business venture that is to create value from the innovative solution is to be rooted in poor communities. This interesting and potentially fruitful development however raises a host of new issues about the politics of participatory ventures with NGOs and poor communities, which remain obscured in the BoP discourse.
BOP 2: co-creating with the poor
In 2004, a best-practice manual called the BoP Protocol was launched, and since then, the manual has already seen a major overhaul as it evolved from the initial top-down model of selling-to-the-poor to one based on bottom-up business co-venturing (for the latest version 2.0 of the BoP Protocol, see Simanis and Hart, 2008). The letter ‘B’ in the abbreviation was re-baptized to ‘Base’ to convey the positive idea of a platform or launch pad from which one can build upwards. It seems as if one wanted to get away from the derogatory ‘Bottom’ to which corporations reach down to help the miserable poor who are stuck there. The complete elaboration of the Protocol version 2.0 is obviously still a work in progress, so it is too early to pass a definitive judgment on its merits and weaknesses. However, we can make some salient observations about the ongoing articulation processes and the direction in which the BoP 2 work is evolving and point to its continuities with earlier BoP 1 work in canceling out the politics of ‘business with the poor’.
A good starting point is the article ‘Innovation from the Inside Out’ by Simanis and Hart (2009) because it represents the latest thinking, and it is here that differences between BoP 1 and BoP 2 are cast in terms of contrasting paradigms of corporate innovation strategy. The article also encapsulates ideas, that provide its building blocks, from earlier contributions (for example, Hart, 2007; Hart and Sharma, 2004; London, 2007; London and Hart, 2004; Simanis et al., 2008).
Simanis and Hart typify the BoP 1 model as the embodiment of the familiar ‘Structural Innovation Paradigm’ (SIP), in which firms attempt to fulfill customer needs by delivering a product or service that is better, faster and cheaper than those of its competitors. SIP’s aim is narrowly financial and short-term: increasing consumption-based value by focusing on latent needs and transactional engagement with stakeholders (2009: 79–80). A big problem with this model, according to Simanis and Hart, is that innovation processes and corporate growth become increasingly disembedded from broader societal values and the natural environment: ‘Communities are framed as target markets. Ecological systems are treated as national resources that supply raw materials’ and there is ‘an absence of shared commitment’ with parties outside the company (2009: 79, 82).
Simanis and Hart argue that the SIP is not conducive to operating at the BoP. Companies must re-embed themselves, along with their stakeholders, into broader society and the natural environment, adopting an ‘Embedded Innovation Paradigm’ (EIP). The EIP is not about satisfying latent consumer needs, but about fostering and nurturing local economic potential of communities (here, note the affinity to the aims of any participatory or community-based rural development intervention). The values it creates do not lie in the field of utility maximization through increased material consumption, but in the sphere of intangible assets—gaining people’s trust, helping to reshape their identities, and fostering a sense of belonging in local communities—that are springboards for personal growth and creativity. Relationships with stakeholders then are not impersonal market transactions, but durable and intimate exchanges, aimed at transformation of thinking and behavior through social engagement and building of mutual trust and confidence, or ‘business intimacy’ (Simanis and Hart, 2009: 83–84).
In order to make a successful transformation from the SIP to the EIP, corporations must evolve radically new management and organizational routines. New-style BoP solutions have to be business models that involve and empower the poor as venture entrepreneurs and value producers, rather than just new product offerings that push the poor into the role of passive consumers (London and Hart, 2004: 363; World Economic Forum, 2009: 9). It seems to be recognized now that a product-driven ‘technological fix approach’ is not the way to go, but not because poverty is viewed as relational and contingent on durable inequalities in a society.
According to Hart and co-authors, the BoP business models cannot emerge from blueprints thought up by TNCs outside the local context. Innovation at the BoP must be a co-creation process, based on extensive participation and partnership with poor communities, involving deep dialogue, openness to experimentation and mutual learning, and aimed at building local capacity. This would lead to the creation of ‘new communities’, of which the company is an integral part and through which it helps reshape the people’s identity (Simanis et al., 2008: 66). According to the BoP Protocol, this new organizational form requires that TNC representatives stay in poor communities for some time to understand local problems, pressing needs, social customs and ways of doing things. A host of parties such as local governmental agencies, NGOs, other types of civil-society organizations must also be involved as co-creation partners because they bring essential unique knowledge, skills, assets and experience to the table. The locally influential stakeholders among them can facilitate and mediate a TNC’s entry into poor communities, while the poor, weak, isolated, non-legitimate, and even non-human ‘fringe’ must be involved because their perspectives are crucial for incubating disruptive change (Hart and Sharma, 2004).
The emphasis on building intangible assets of local capacity for wealth creation, local project ‘ownership’, shared commitment and cohesion—as opposed to directly meeting material needs of the poor—reminds one of models of participatory and community driven development. Indeed, the adoption of strategies based on the EIP are inspired by these, notably the need for participation of poor farmers championed by Chambers (1983) and Sen’s (1999) ‘development as freedom’ conceptualization. Local development (poverty reduction) is not assumed to flow from poor people’s consumption of TNC-supplied goods and services, but rather through the poor’s co-ownership of a new business venture and the resulting emancipation and empowerment. Thus, while BoP 1 was driven primarily by the rich world ‘management’ and business paradigm, BoP 2 is explicitly attempting to establish linkages with some literature on rural development, without severing the ‘management’ connection (the latter exemplified by terminology such as SIP and EIP). A corresponding shift is happening on the development side, where recent reports published by the UNCPSD (2004) and UNDP (2008) increasingly echo BoP thinking from ‘management’ circles while retaining their developmental flavour. The emerging ‘combination of similarity and difference’ between management and development thought is by no means revolutionary or novel and has been observed earlier by Cooke (2004: 605) for development administration/management and ‘management’, taught and researched at development studies departments and business schools respectively. However, ‘this combination of similarity and difference’ is unable to effectively hide the ‘contemporary complicity’ of leading development institutions (such as the World Bank and UNDP) and some ‘management’ bodies (corporations and business schools) in spreading neoliberalism around the world. 3
This diffusion is facilitated by writings that omit any political struggles based on different values or interests between diverse participants in prospective BoP 2-style business ventures. Assuming the existence of ‘goodwill’ on all sides for starting constructive dialogue and engagement might just be a discursive wrapping to hide some deep-rooted differences. As the president of Oxfam America pointedly noted in a keynote speech to a large BoP conference:
Oxfam is interested in NGO-corporate partnerships that address obstacles to development, empower stakeholders, and build corporate accountability. [But] … how do we find mutual interests in our core missions? Is that actually something that’s possible? Second, how do we identify win-win outcomes that we can build upon? Is it possible for us to actually do a deal? And finally, how do we find systemic market-based solutions to fundamental social problems? Is that a pipe dream or is that something we might be able to pursue together? (Kasturi Rangan et al., 2007: 9)
These are fundamental questions.
On the corporate side, pressures to generate profit from BoP projects within a short time-horizon will take the driving seat: Global capitalist institutions are after all geared to observing the financial bottom line, and individual corporate business units cannot simply step out of that treadmill (Raworth et al., 2008). As noted by Mark O’Connor (2009) of Pfizer Global:
Operational units need to generate a return on investment in order to achieve buy-in, both internally within the management structure of a company, as well as, externally with its stockholders … The fact is that a loss, cost, or net-zero balance will simply not achieve [this].
But even when the financial issue is not an overriding constraint, widespread evidence on the non-performance of CSR on social development criteria (see e.g. Frynas, 2005; Garvey and Newell 2005), coupled with wider controversies surrounding many TNCs on issues of land grabs and exploitation of workers in poorer regions of the world (e.g. Banerjee, 2000; Fig, 2007; Jenkins et al., 2002), places serious doubts on the TNCs’ ability (and ‘noble’ intentions) to engage in poverty alleviation. For this reason in the CSR and development literature, some have argued that the role for corporations in poverty reduction may in fact be quite limited and perhaps the ‘greatest contribution [that] CSR initiatives can make is through reinforcing state-led development policy’ (Newell and Frynas, 2007: 679). However, how such relations between the state and business can be forged in the fight against poverty remains to be spelled out: many public-private initiatives in the past have simply been a cover for further erosion of the state’s responsibility towards the poor (see Miraftab, 2004; Reed and Reed, 2006).
Development through BoP business ventures is likely to follow in the footsteps of CSR as being ‘an arena of political contestation both in the “macro” sense of defining relations between the market and the state, and between different actors and social groups, and in relation to participation in decision-making’ (Prieto-Carrón et al, 2006: 984, quoting UNRISD, 2003: 21). Language, culture, education and the plurality of values can all affect the process of negotiation and decision making (Blowfield and Frynas, 2005: 507). Even though these critical issues have recently enlivened debates around CSR, they have been largely ignored by the BoP proponents. In fact, the BoP proponents’ very concept of ‘community identity’ could turn out to be fallacious in the face of profound power inequalities, diverse caste or tribal allegiances, gender biases, and conflicting agendas being pursued by different parties. One gets the impression that the main BoP 2 proponents are unaware of any of these issues. In a recent BoP paper, participation issues are reduced to some flat observations about ‘the ideal degree’ of participation, which is conceived of as lying somewhere on a scale from 0% to 100%, in most cases probably somewhere close to 50% (London, 2007: 27–28). In practice such metrics could mean anything, or nothing at all. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, no critical case studies of the practice of ‘participatory’ BoP ventures are available in the literature. To uncover the complexities of the practice of participatory projects in the remainder of this article, therefore, we rely on relevant slices of the literature on anthropology of participatory and community-based development (see for example, Lewis and Mosse, 2006; Mosse, 2005; Rossi, 2006). Understanding this practice is crucial for appreciating how the poor get involved in the local poverty-reduction projects.
The politics of participation and heterogeneity
A new BoP project arrives into a rich social world with its own well-entrenched habits, practices and values. BoP proponents want to change these ‘old ways’ of people, replacing them with a ‘new way of thinking’ which embraces the new ‘enterprise’s values’ (Simanis and Hart, 2009: 83, on ‘Transformational Stakeholder Engagement’). However, whether this embracement of new ways actually creates or destroys existing value for all or some members of a community is left out of the picture (but see London, 2007, who raises this issue in a cautionary reflection). And value must be viewed broadly here, beyond the purview of financial profitability, to include capabilities, socio-economic equity, and self-respect. Financially, the creation of a new business venture is supposed to bring profits into a new community. However, the arrangements to coordinate the distribution of profits between different members of the ‘new community’ are not tackled in the BoP protocol or elsewhere in the literature (but see London, 2007, and World Economic Forum, 2009: 31–32). The nature of value creation, destruction and distribution will depend on the actual practice of BoP ventures, which will be driven by local and non-local social hierarchies and political-economic contexts.
Simanis and Hart (2009) discuss two cases as shining examples of responsible capitalism to be emulated at the BoP: the Grameen Bank (GB) led micro-credit programmes in Bangladesh and the giant Mondragón Cooperative Complex (MCC) in Spain. 4 In both cases, optimistic scenarios are painted, based on dominant pro-GB and pro-MCC discourses in academic and policy circles, overlooking any possible critiques of the two ‘success’ stories.
A substantial literature, critical of GB’s ‘micro-credit as poor women’s empowerment’ doctrine, has for instance argued that destitute women are often excluded from women’s savings groups because they are deemed to pose too high a risk for other group members (Ghosh, 2006). Similarly, Karim (2008) documents that rural middle class women benefited most from micro-credit. She compares micro-credit success to a lottery ticket: a few successful cases instill the promise of ‘making a windfall’ in numerous others. Additionally, in a majority of the cases, micro-credit loans are eventually used by male members of a household: a fact acknowledged by Mohd. Yunus himself (Yunus and Jolis 1998, quoted in Karim 2008; also see Goetz and Sen Gupta, 1996; Rahman, 1999). Furthermore, social solidarity in tight-knit rural communities may not be the only reason behind high recovery rates at the GB: Ito (2003: 328) shows that coercive power of bank workers over the rural poor ‘strengthens the credit discipline of the borrower’. Even the borrowers’ groups may not be horizontally structured but some group members may wield more power than others (Rahman, 1999). Furthermore, non-payment of a loan installment threatens a woman’s honor and shame in rural Bangladesh, and households try their best to pay on time often by lending money from other sources (Karim, 2008; Rahman, 1999). Thus, there is a high risk that poor households get trapped on a debt-treadmill. Driven by the global ideology of neoliberalism since the late 1970s, the ‘withdrawal of the state from welfarist policies’ has substantially enlarged the space for organizations such as GB to become instrumental ‘shadow states’ in providing human welfare and development (Karim, 2008: 6).
Describing MCC, Simanis and Hart once again mention no classes or power relations, and uncritically rehearse the strength of Mondragón’s ‘vision of cooperative entrepreneurship’ from the dominant pro-MCC discourse (2009: 84). This discourse was constructed by divorcing it from its political and economic contexts and by omitting any complexities and contradictions (Kasmir, 1999). Kasmir (1996) found that MCC workers were not more satisfied with their jobs than workers at a unionized private firm in a neighboring town. In addition, workers at MCC rarely made use of the substantial participatory democracy avenues available to them because ‘they lack the expertise to fully evaluate engineers’ proposals and managers’ business plans or to develop alternatives’ (Kasmir, 1999: 387). Overall Kasmir argues that workers’ own perspectives are missing from the MCC discourse while, at the same time, accounts of their accomplishments are central. The discourse is largely derived from managerial perspectives, according to which no class conflict, no contestations, and no inequalities exist at MCC. According to Kasmir (1999: 394), this privileging of managerial perspectives must be situated within ‘global transformations of work, class relations and ideology’ which, since the 1970s, have led to an increase of managerial control in workplaces across Europe and United States.
The above examples point to three socio-political issues that remain hidden in the BoP discourse: a) heterogeneity within a community (of the ‘poor’); b) unequal power relations between project administrators or managers and the so-called beneficiaries and c) the wider politico-economic contexts in which individual communities are embedded. First, intra-community inequalities play a central role in driving the practice of a business model and in shaping the poor’s capacities to seize any economic opportunities offered by a BoP venture. In fact, by obscuring the heterogeneity among the poor and representing them as an essentialized mass of undifferentiated people, the BoP discourse may ‘mask the consolidation of privelege and position’ (Kapoor, 2008: xv). Second, the same masking is intensified by ignoring the hierarchies between external TNC, state or NGO actors and rural communities in participatory development projects. These social-epistemological hierarchies have an important bearing on how community needs and knowledge are interpreted and represented—whose needs and knowledge are considered legitimate and whose are left out of the picture. Participation by the poor in BoP activities is then framed by, and embedded in, local and non-local social relations. Third, communities cannot be disconnected from national/global politico-economic contexts with which they may possess strong material and ideological links (cf. Kasmir, 1999). Global markets and (inter-)national political developments may provide opportunities for successful ventures involving the poor, but more often they may end up creating new vulnerabilities (as our review of smallholder agriculturalists in India will show). Masking these adverse incorporation impacts leads to a dishonest portrayal of win-win propositions as is the case with much of the BoP literature discussed in the previous section.
Intra-community heterogeneity
Communities may be defined as governable spaces at different geographical scales (Watts, 2005). In general, people may be part of multiple communities such as those based on class, ethnicity, religion, caste, gender, same age groups, constituency of a leader, and thus have multiple identities through these community affiliations (Watts, 2005). These multiple identities then act as bases for heterogeneity in a single community defined at some socio-spatial level. In other words, grouping people together in one community does not lead to a decimation of other identities and affiliations to other possible communities. In the following, our primary focus is on a local community defined at the level of one village, or a small cluster of villages, or an urban neighbourhood.
The nature of intra-village heterogeneity can take different forms in different parts of the world. We use cases largely from rural India to illustrate our arguments. In the first instance, heterogeneity in a local community manifests itself as class that we reduce for now, in agricultural areas, to landownership. Even in a village afflicted with poverty, there are rich and poor farmers who are assisted in their agricultural tasks by the landless (for examples of unequal landownership in north and south Indian villages, see Jeffrey et al., 2008; Nair et al., 2007; Rawal, 2001; Wadley, 1994). Furthermore, landownership in multi-caste (and tribe) villages is not independent of caste affiliation.
Caste in India continues to be associated with unequal access to land (Singh, 2008), but the forms of inequality sustained through the caste system are not restricted to landownership. There is by now considerable evidence that people from the lower castes (Scheduled Castes, SC, or Dalits) and tribes (Scheduled Tribes, ST) have lower living standards than non-SC/ST people (Deshpande, 2001; Dréze and Sen, 2002; Kijima, 2006). Kijima found that in the same village, ST households earn lower returns on their investment than non-SC/ST households. This relationship between caste and poverty is observed in urban and rural India. Affirmative action (reservations in educational institutions, government jobs and rural development programmes) by Indian governments in the last six decades has had limited impact on eradication of lower caste destitution (Kijima, 2006). It is important to note here that state-sponsored categories of SC and ST include a large diverse group of castes and tribes. One can observe substantial heterogeneity, in terms of living standards and landownership, even within a single caste or tribe group living in one village. Some members of a caste group may afford better opportunities than others, for example, as a result of possessing better social networks to influential patrons within a village and outside. Thus, there may be no one-to-one correspondence between destitution and membership of a lower caste or tribe.
Heterogeneity among individual households (or ‘heads’ of households) leads to a skewed power distribution within a community. 5 This power has many faces. In the first instance, it is expressed in an interpersonal relationship. Here, one of the members of a relationship (ego) controls the actions of the other (alter), such as in patron-client relationships. This form of power is ‘understood as the ability of an ego to impose its will on an alter, in social action, in interpersonal relations’ (Wolf, 1990: 586). A second form of power is more pervasive and implies the ability of an individual actor to control the settings within which others act and interact. A third form of power, which may be seen as an extension of the second, ‘organizes and orchestrates the settings themselves’ or in Foucault’s words, it is the ability ‘to structure the possible field of action of others’ (Wolf, 1990: 586). The latter two forms of power have consequences for how benefits from a development project are distributed across a community. Exercise of these structural forms of power determines which voices are raised in public, or silenced, and whose knowledge and interests are paramount in participatory or community-driven development.
In a survey of community-based and -driven development projects, Mansuri and Rao (2004) find that power relations between community elites and others can lead to an elite capture of decision-making in, and benefits from, a project (also see Abraham and Platteau, 2004; Classen et al., 2008; Platteau, 2004). Examples of such projects have been observed in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Mansuri and Rao, 2004). Elites derive their power and their roles as leaders from local (and in some cases, non-local) institutions: they are often caste or tribal headmen and/or well-connected to political parties and development agencies from outside the village. These elites often act as brokers who connect development agencies to target (poor) beneficiaries: many NGOs use them as entry points into a community and through this, play a role in further entrenching their local power. The elites then also control the flow of information from external agencies into the community and vice versa. And this control of information flows may enable community leaders to convince development agencies that their own private interests are the interests of the community as a whole, including those of the poorest members (Platteau, 2004). In this way, elites ‘produce’ local knowledge that excludes voices of non-dominant members of a community (including women) and makes a participatory project more suited to their own needs rather than those of the poor (Mosse, 1995, 2001).
Elite capture does not of course affect all community-led development projects. In some cases, ‘benevolent’ elite control rather than ‘pernicious’ elite capture may be observed (see Dasgupta and Beard, 2007; and Fritzen, 2007 for evidence from Indonesia). In the benevolent scenario, the elites who dominate a project, yet distribute its benefits, may be downwardly accountable to members of their communities (Mansuri and Rao, 2004). Such accountability is likely to avoid elite capture in the provision of public goods (Wade, 1988; cited in Mansuri and, Rao, 2004). This situation may however be difficult to realize for privately appropriable profits, such as those promised by BoP ventures.
Between the dichotomy of elite capture versus elite control, one may observe cases where elites capture development resources for their own benefit and that of their extended kin and network of friends (see Jeffrey et al., 2008:1381–1382 for an example), while excluding the wider (more heterogeneous) community. In these cases, the elites are downwardly accountable only to their kin and friends. Such a form of elite capture and bounded redistribution may also be observed in pro-poor development projects in which the benefits on offer are not of direct interest to the comparatively richer elites. Here, the elites work to siphon off the benefits to ‘their poor’ through patronage networks (Mosse, 1995).
Finally, the authority of elites may be contested by non-dominant social groups, or individuals from competing factions, within a community. In such cases, a power sharing arrangement can arise between different social groups, each represented by their leader (Tanabe, 2007 makes such a claim while tracing the village-level impact of the 73rd amendment to the Indian constitution which made multi-caste village councils mandatory). However, emergence of a new power-sharing arrangement due to a constitutional amendment or another development, exogenous or endogenous to the community, does not imply that difference and heterogeneity are replaced by equality and homogeneity. Poor and rich individuals, more and less powerful social groups, and cultural hierarchies such as those sustained by the caste system generally continue to exist. Here, it is important to note that developments external to a village can aid subaltern groups trying to wrestle respect and self-determination from dominant individuals and social groups. In response, locally-dominant groups may launch a counter-resistance effort (more on this dialectic later). External interventions must be introduced gradually and cautiously into communities as they ‘interact with already contested domains of power and meaning’ (Li, 1996: 515, quoted in Mosse, 1997: 499). In general, communities are at least as much a space for contestation as for benevolence on part of its elites: ‘Communities typically contain both reactionary (despotic or disciplinary) and emancipatory (liberatory) expressions that are, as it were, in perpetual struggle with one another: communities are not always warm and fuzzy’ (Watts, 2005: 105). This is as likely to be true for the ‘new communities’ envisioned by Simanis and Hart (2008; 2009), which arise when representatives from TNCs and local NGOs have embedded themselves in the ‘old communities’.
Interactions between external actors and communities
In recent BoP literature, interactions between external actors and communities are framed in terms of development of a new business model which can eventually lead to a new product or service. The organizational space for the development of this business model is provided by the so-called new communities, in which development NGOs are involved as central actors.
A common assumption is that involving grassroots NGOs will solve the problems of embedding a new venture into poor communities and facilitate participation. However, evidence on NGO-led participatory projects collected over the last three decades has shown that such projects are not immune ‘from the problems affecting larger, officially sponsored aid programmes’ (Feeney, 1998: 7). These problems relate to ensuring the ‘participation of the poorest and equitable distribution’ of project benefits (Feeney, 1998: 151).
In the following, we discuss two sets of practices of interpretation and representation used by development workers in participatory projects, which have a bearing on (financial and non-financial) outcomes of the projects. According to the first, local needs and knowledge are framed in ways consistent with extant social hierarchies between development ‘experts’ and poor communities. The second set of practices is often based on collusion between development workers and participating communities. These actors share a set of cultural codes which facilitate the communication of local needs and knowledge. Representation of local needs is then a dialogic process which occurs within a shared culture of development. But this shared culture, like any other, is made up of heterogeneous elements, and power and difference persist ‘between different ‘speakers’ within the same cultural circuit’ (Hall, 1997: 11). Thus, cultural communication takes place within the context of heterogeneity and asymmetric power relations, allowing the representation of certain facts as authoritative while obscuring others.
According to the first set of practices of interpretation, community conditions (poverty, inequality, or in more specific projects, lack of sanitation infrastructure, health impacts of excessive pesticide use) are problematized as ‘deficiencies that need to be rectified’ (Li, 2007: 7; also see Escobar, 1995). Building on this, external agencies play an active role in framing local needs to ensure that their own agendas are reflected in what they read on the ground (Mosse, 2001: 19–21). Actual needs of the poor are narrowed down, reinterpreted in terms of solutions, such as technical expertise or products, that the external agency can deliver. 6 Furthermore, this practice of interpreting and constructing communities’ needs situates agency personnel as local experts, who then expect behavioral changes from community members and make the latter amenable to expert direction (Mitchell, 2002).
According to the second set of practices, an external agency may not be able to force its will on and coerce villagers into expressing their needs solely according to the agency’s preferences. Here, some degree of collusion between dominant community members and representatives of the external agency may lead to the exclusion of needs of non-dominant groups in a community from the list of local needs generated through a participatory appraisal (Chhotray, 2004; Mosse, 1995). Accounting for conflicting or contested claims, that are a normal feature of heterogeneous communities where interests of one group can diverge from those of another, is never easy to accommodate in time-bound development projects (Chhotray, 2004). Thus, a dominant group’s interests may be legitimized and attributed to a whole community, who may also possess more skill (based on similar prior experiences) and authority in presenting their personal interests as those of the community (Mosse, 2001: 21). This practice of interpretation has the impact of negating local political relations within a community (Chhotray, 2004; Li, 2007).
Over time, however, the poor (in ‘pro-poor’ development projects) may understand what a project can provide, and thus gain some planning or policy knowledge about the development agency’s activities (Mosse, 2005). They may then utilize this newly acquired planning knowledge to get the project to meet some of their idiosyncratic needs, often adapted from the set of benefits that the development agencies are able to deliver. In this way, poor beneficiaries attempt to match the knowledge generated by the project about local needs with their own interests.
Moving to participatory technology development, Chambers’ (1983) famous dictum of ‘putting the last first’ requires that knowledge circulate among external ‘experts’ and community members. In practice, however, it is difficult to achieve such two-way transfer of technical knowledge, due to the fact that community members’ knowledge is considered to be ‘local or indigenous knowledge’ (IK), different from the experts’ own scientific knowledge. Through this classification, experts relegate peoples’ knowledge, skills and experience to the realm of the non-scientific i.e., practical knowledge about concrete everyday life or relevant only in its local context; scattered; akin to common sense (lacking intellectual content and deductive logic); closed and non-systematic (Agrawal, 1995). However, as Agrawal has demonstrated, there are no substantive, epistemological and contextual differences between scientific knowledge and IK. The differences instead are rather political: the politics of classifying knowledge into different categories, where the global (and national) asymmetries of wealth and authority are projected on to the knowledge arena, privileging modern science over IK (Agrawal, 2002). Such entrenched knowledge hierarchies are unlikely to be bridged by forming a coalition, or a new community in the sense of the BoP protocol, to muster social and political support for participatory technology development (cf. Biggs and Smith, 1998).
This is true even in projects where IK is touted as something essential to harness for making development more effective in meeting the needs of the poor (e.g. Blaikie et al., 1997; Warren, 1991), promoting environmental sustainability, and generally avoiding the pitfalls of top-down high-modernist development so vividly documented by Scott (1998). However, it needs to be recognized that IK, like all knowledge, is produced and interpreted within a set of unequal social relations. In other words, honoring peoples’ knowledge is simply not going to succeed without remapping the cultural power structures in which the knowledge, and its interpretation, is embedded (Gururani, 2002). For instance, within the context of a participatory project, development workers are likely to discredit beneficiaries’ practices and knowledge through ‘superior models of knowing and rational decision making introduced by educated well-dressed outsiders, guided by foreign “participation experts”’ (Mosse, 2005: 96).
However, as with local needs, it may be erroneous to view the participatory knowledge dynamics as solely top-down. Mosse (2005) argues that privileging such a top-down imposition perspective obscures the agency of the poor in co-opting or complying with the official view of local knowledge. For instance, by adopting modern techniques such as ‘scientific’ agriculture, community members may successfully project themselves as rational agents worthy of the development benefits targeted at them (Mosse, 2005).
In the foregoing, we have pointed to the existence of a shared culture of development in which local needs and knowledge are interpreted and represented through interactions between development administrators and local communities. But, how and why does a shared culture of development get constructed? Here it may be instructive to view development as an institution which rewards those actors who abide by its rules (Douglas, 1987, cited in Rossi, 2006). In this way, community members attempt to gain benefits from participatory projects by conforming to their role as ‘development beneficiaries’. Local development workers similarly interpret community needs and represent the practice of a project in terms of planned ‘policy narrative’ of the project; and finally, the ‘planners align their arguments with dominant development paradigms to find support for their plans’ (Rossi, 2006: 29). An alternate way to understand the shared culture of development is through Foucault’s (1991) concept of governmentality. Governmentality does not operate as forced coercion and extension of bureaucratic regulation, but through the ‘conduct of conduct’, or the regulation of people’s actions by configuring their aspirations to match the interests of the powerful. Here, power is viewed as something ‘productive rather than repressive’ and is concerned with creating subjects who act as they ought to (Lewis and Mosse, 2006: 3; Li, 2007). Development then ‘operates by educating desires and configuring habits, aspirations and beliefs’ (Li, 2007 :5).
The community, severed from its context
Isolating a community for purposes of a development intervention, or social analysis, may create a neat governable and controllable social world (Cornwall and Brock, 2005). However, as discussed above, governability of the community is achieved by negotiating local power relations. In the following, we argue that a community is typically connected to wider regional/global politico-economic contexts through material and ideological links. By positing a community as isolated, a discourse can preempt discussions about how global movements of corporate capital, commodities, and ideologies create new vulnerabilities in poor communities. The latter discussions have the power to ‘rupture the optimistic narrative’ of poverty alleviation and win-win situations (cf. Kasmir, 1999: 394), as propagated in the BoP literature.
Beyond the discursive realm, global and national politico-economic contexts have a bearing on the practice of a development project and its outcomes. As we show in the following, the global and the national are brought home in myriad ways by people in local communities. For example, the context may be appropriated by subalterns to aid their struggle for respect and equality in a community. In opposition, the dominant big men in the community may employ parallel developments at the national or global level in their counter-resistance efforts. Thus, wider politico-economic developments get reflected in local contestations and struggles for survival, filtering into everyday lives of the poor, and so cannot be easily overridden by new financial interests such as those promised by a BoP venture.
Continuing our focus on rural India, we briefly consider the impacts, and community-level endogenization, of two wider contextual developments of recent decades. First, we discuss the widening sphere of interactions between caste-based identities and electoral politics, and their multiple manifestations at the village-level. Secondly, we bring in the global economic context in terms of agricultural markets and declining state support for agriculture in neoliberal India. Small and marginal farmers attempt to secure their livelihoods within this context, while being exposed to newer vulnerabilities.
‘Modern’ electoral politics uses ‘traditional’ caste structures to stabilize itself, legitimizing the actions of its leaders and mobilizing the masses with the aid of caste identities and loyalties (Béteille, 1970; Kaviraj, 1997; Kothari, 1970; Rudolph and Rudolph, 1967). In turn, caste as an evolving institution gets intimately modified through the influence of electoral politics, often through consolidation of caste identities and internal solidarity, and aggravation of caste-based divides and inter-caste conflicts. Although the bulk of this process visibly takes place at provincial and national levels, where we observe the increasing clout of lower caste political parties such as the pro-Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh (Jaffrelot, 2003), effects are also felt at local levels in villages (Jeffrey et al., 2008). People in villages often use their awareness of, and ties to, national and regional political (and/or religious) movements in their local struggles for greater recognition, dignity and power (Mines, 2002; Somjee, 1973). In fact, national and regional politics are integrated into everyday life within villages to such an extent that the non-local becomes the local. Consider the struggles for equality waged by Pallars (Dalits) in the Tamil village studied by Mines. In the first instance, this struggle took the form of the Pallars’ refusal to attend a temple festival led by the dominant landowning castes of the village and in which the Dalits played a peripheral role (such boycotts of ritual events by Dalits in south India have also been noted by Dirks, 1988, and Fuller, 1992, cited in Mines, 2002: 68). Secondly, the struggle took an openly subversive stance through the organization of a Pallar temple festival in which the dominant villagers were exposed to the Pallar ‘vision of a different, egalitarian future’ (Mines, 2002: 69). This assertion by the Pallars had several features including ‘a bold procession route, displays of wealth and largess, taking over a road, and using portraits of Ambedkar, a national Untouchable hero and leader, to define an alternative, extravillage source of identity and power’ (Mines, 2002: 69).
In response to these lower-caste ‘assertions of identity’ (Owens, 2000: 704), the upper castes organize ‘counter-resistance’ to set the stage for inter-caste conflict and slow down a radical transformation of society toward greater equality (Jeffrey et al., 2008; Mines, 2005). At the level of regional and national electoral politics, this trend is exemplified by the rise of the Hindu nationalist parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party and Shiv Sena in the 1980s and 1990s, who support reinstatement of the caste system’s hierarchical order. At the local level, members of upper castes may exploit national developments, such as the destruction of the Babri Mosque in December 1992 and subsequent attempts to build a Hindu temple in its place by Hindu nationalists, to marginalize lower castes and Muslims (see Mines, 2005: 201–208 for a telling example). In addition, many members of the upper castes are locally ‘well-equipped—economically, socially, and culturally—to counterresist lower-caste political assertion’ (Jeffrey et al., 2008: 1382). Upper caste tactics include economic exclusion of recalcitrant lower caste members who depend on them for agricultural employment; building more effective social networks with government bureaucracies; and development of ‘sophisticated’ identities through urban clothing and construction of new multi-storied houses replete with modern goods such as televisions and refrigerators (Jeffrey et al., 2008). The new urbane identity has the impact of creating difference from lower caste leaders who are then projected as uncouth or backward.
Overall, assertions of identity by lower castes may enlarge their symbolic and ritual space within a village and provide armament to the build-up of a wider lower-caste political discourse. But, their impact on everyday livelihoods and better access to economic and social resources is restricted due to effective counter-resistance by the more powerful upper castes. And as we noted earlier, according to widespread economic evidence, lower caste membership continues to be correlated with insecure livelihoods and lower living standards.
Our second wider context of local communities explores the integration of small farmers into global agricultural markets. The Indian national government has been pursuing policies that promote economic liberalization, beginning with the 1991 reforms which signaled India’s entry into the Washington consensus regime of globalization. In this regime, developing country governments framed their national policies under neoliberal prescriptions of the IMF, WTO and the World Bank. These policies have led to a gradual withdrawal of state support to ‘non-priority’ sectors such as agriculture, health and education, in order to achieve fiscal discipline at the macro-level. The brunt of these withdrawals is felt by the poor. Trade in agriculture was also liberalized as part of this process and since the mid-1990s, global trends in crop prices are closely reflected in local markets. The volatility in global prices then sends uncertain signals regarding shifting of cropping patterns to farmers (Ghosh, 2005): farmers may switch to an alternate crop only to find that the price has fallen by the time they bring the crop to market (Ghosh, 2009 cites cotton and groundnut as two examples). 7 These price fluctuations, coupled with declining public investment in agriculture (erosion of agricultural subsidies and extension services, reduction in resource allocation for irrigation and other agricultural infrastructure, reform of minimum support price and public procurement); 8 rising farm-input costs; 9 lack of affordable credit; 10 water scarcity and widespread failure of borewells are commonly reported as central causes of falling agricultural incomes and rural indebtedness, which in turn are believed to have driven thousands of farmers to commit suicide (Ghosh, 2005; Mishra, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b; Nagaraj, 2008; Posani, 2009; Sainath, 2009; The Hindu, 2007; The New York Times, 2006). 11 This agrarian distress has gripped many Indian provinces, including the prosperous agricultural states of the Punjab and Harayana. And areas that produce export crops are the worst-affected. During the post-liberalization 1990s, many provincial governments had encouraged farmers to switch to export-oriented cash crops (Posani, 2009).
In the foregoing, we have used two cases from India to show how the global/national politico-economic context manifests itself in everyday life of local communities. Paying adequate attention to this context is essential because it not only engenders changes in people’s identities, but also has a bearing on the practice of any community development effort by producing newer forms of vulnerabilities. Thus, any local development intervention is entangled, through material and ideological links, with global markets and information currents. The latter also shape any national policies or plans to ‘uplift’ the poor by legitimating only those policies that are consistent with the reigning ideology of neoliberalism, and by aligning the interests of local elites with non-local ones.
Conclusions
Recent BoP writings signal the rise of new (for-profit) private sector interventions directly in the lives of the poor. This privatization of poverty reduction follows in the footsteps of community-based and participatory development initiatives sponsored by development agencies such as the World Bank and UNDP and Corporate Social Responsibility activities of many corporations in poor communities. These local development initiatives were (and are still) promoted at the same time as advancing the spread of neoliberalism over the planet, perhaps to compensate for, and foster, the effective withdrawal of state support for welfare provision to the poor. The resulting global regime of thin welfare states has not only significantly worsened economic inequality in fast-growing countries such as China and India, and vulnerability throughout the global south, but also further enlarged the space for development NGOs and privately-owned corporations to act as patrons to the poor through their CSR activities. 12 Recently, after two decades of lacklustre performance of many CSR and NGO-led poverty reduction activities, the neoliberal agenda seems to have found the ‘perfect’ solution: making a profit by reducing third world poverty (note that poverty in the so-called first world is never the target of BoP proponents’ attention). One must admit that this solution at least appears more honest than the greenwashing perpetrated by earlier CSR (and sustainable development) discourses. Extracting a profit from business with the poor is no longer considered problematic.
Or perhaps it still is, as the trend toward BoP 2 suggests. In these new BoP writings, the role of the poor in BoP ventures has broadened, they are no longer simply consumers but also co-creators of productive innovations in participatory business models where any profits are to be shared among the corporations, the poor communities and intermediary NGOs. However, just as CSR has acted as an ‘ideological movement that consolidates the power of large transnational corporations’ (Banerjee, 2007: 147), the BoP discourse by using the depoliticized rhetoric of ‘new communities’, ‘partnerships’, ‘participation’ and ‘inclusivity’ occludes any unequal relations of power that shape the practice of a business venture or innovation process (see Murphy 2008 on similar rhetoric of the World Bank, cited in Willmott, 2008). In fact, the BoP literature is rapidly inching toward a new corpus of apolitical management studies for managing the (adverse) incorporation of the poor into world markets and further neoliberalization of extremely indigent areas of the planet. Such an apolitical understanding of complex social dynamics, by masking extant privelege and its consolidation (cf. Kapoor, 2008: xv), will only serve to reproduce existing inequalities at the local level and further entrench the dominance of national and global capitalist formations.
We believe that future critical work in organization studies has to come to grips with both the depoliticized rhetoric and the actual cultural-political practice of poverty-reducing ventures at the BoP organized by corporations (while adhering to their financial bottom line in the short- and the long-run), supplementing earlier efforts to unmask the greenwashing that sanitizes the actual practice of CSR and sustainable development interventions (e.g. Banerjee, 2007; Fig, 2007; Newell and Frynas 2007; Prieto-Carrón et al, 2006). These new exercises of critical understanding, however, in our opinion, should not follow in the tracks of the critical post-development studies (e.g. Escobar, 1995; Rahnema and Bawtree 1997), as Banerjee (2007) tends to do for CSR interventions by assuming that the TNC’s BoP activities bring about an imposition of a Western modernity on the Third World poor who are left with no choice but to resist this new juggernaut of privatized development. Instead, we believe it is more fruitful and insightful to base any critiques on new ethnographic case studies to uncover and grasp the practice of BoP ventures on the ground—case studies that are non-essentialist in orientation i.e. they are sensitive to the creation, maintenance and exploitation of difference within and without ‘poor’ communities. Such a case study approach also leaves room for analyzing the agency of the poor whose strategies of participation in BoP ventures can range from active cooperation in TNC-led ventures to outright rejection and resistance. However, at the same time, exaggerating the poor’s agency by romanticizing their capacity for strategizing or self-governance (and their buying power), as performed in much of the BoP literature, leads to a neglect of historical constraints placed on the poor by local and global institutional and cultural contexts. Thus, one has to find a fertile middle ground where poor peoples’ agency is conceptualized as relational, embedded in their immediate local social relations and history but not without connections to broader national/global movements (for self-determination and/or incorporation), as we have attempted to do in this article.
From such a relational perspective, indeed deprivation itself must be understood as a social relation, rather than a problem to be fixed through access to new products and services. As we have argued, local asymmetric relations of power, socially-constructed routines of different stakeholders, and community embeddedness in global politico-economic contexts shape the practice of any participatory ventures at the BoP. The nature of this practice then determines whose needs and knowledge are considered legitimate within a community, and how these needs and knowledge are interpreted through more or less routinized practices by development workers. Thus, these participatory processes are situated within structures of asymmetric power distribution between development ‘experts’ and heterogeneous communities of the poor on the one hand, and global/national currents of corporate capital, commodities, information and ideologies on the other.
In this article, we have not attempted to scrutinize some important assumptions of the BoP discourse through our uncritical adoption of the terminology of Pyramids and Bottoms (now, Bases) and the whole idea of a global demographic hierarchy. We have also overlooked visions of alternate, socially responsible forms of organizing economic activity outside the domain of a globalized neoliberal capitalism. These
alternate visions of social justice have less to do with how corporations penetrate civil society or enter into dialogue with it but more to do with how marginalized and impoverished communities that are non-corporate, non-market and non-state actors can ensure their rights are protected in a democracy. (Banerjee, 2007: 155)
Our silence on these alternate visions is due to (a) the lack of space in this article to treat them in any detail, and (b) the lack of suitable theoretical vantage points from which to approach them. Banerjee for instance veers toward post-development theorists in romanticizing the democratic ecologism of indigenous communities and assumes their isolation and difference from the world of global capitalism (by situating them as ‘non-market’ and ‘non-corporate’). Other positions against global neoliberal developmentalism call for a renewed role for the state, in partnership with civil society, to regulate markets and shoulder responsibility towards the marginalized (e.g. Watts, 2006). Both positions are problematic: the former for its essentialized positioning of indigeneity by assuming the existence of a world of ‘pure difference’ for the communities, and the latter for assuming that a benevolent state dedicated to the creation of an egalitarian society is indeed possible and sustainable in a highly unequal world economy.
Perhaps the way forward lies in detailed study of (the constitution of) everyday practices in social lives of the poor, attempting to understand how they resist, collaborate with, or show indifference toward new global capitalist institutions ushered in through BoP ventures, while simultaneously being embedded in alternate logics of doings and sayings fostered in localized cultures of difference and entanglement. In the heterogeneity of these everyday practices, we should be able to read the complex interplay of poor peoples’ responses to new developmental, capitalist and state, usherings with older idioms of social existence in local communities that have always been implicated in wider ideological and material currents. The transformative and theory-building potential of these readings of messy complexities of everyday life, and the narratives based on them, will then lie in the hands of their future ‘users’ who may reinterpret, re-articulate, or even demolish the ‘original’ ideas. We hope that this engagement of future users, academic and non-academic, rich and poor, in a democratic exercise of theory-building where the experts do not occupy driving seats, will point to pragmatic tactics that the dispossessed can deploy in organizing for justice that is rooted not in universalist principles but in the uncertainty of (trans-) local histories and their global connections.