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In-Depth Information
1990s-2000s: Global Development Focus on
Poverty Alleviation
In the development field, the decade of the 1990s was characterised by
a move to establish poverty alleviation as the number one development
agenda. Despite billions of dollars donated to charities, decades of develop-
ment planning, aid projects and programmes, grants and loans, by the end
of the 1980s it was clear that limited progress had been made in eliminat-
ing poverty (Cling, 2003). It is in this context that poverty alleviation was
made the leading development agenda in the 1990s and 'pro-poor' discourse
came to the fore. It is no coincidence that the term 'pro-poor tourism'
(PPT) was first used in the development literature in 1999 (see Deloitte &
Touche, 1999).
The focus on poverty proved alluring: 'It has provided a powerful rallying
cry - a new development mantra - for those in development practice and
charged with garnering flagging political and financial support for aid pro-
grammes' (Storey et al. , 2005: 30). The World Bank and United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) came out in favour of this approach in 1990,
followed by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which established
International Development Targets (the precursors of the Millennium
Development Goals) in 1996. Concurrently, a number of multilateral and
bilateral donors also came on board to endorse the poverty agenda as their
central aim, for example the Department for International Development
(DFID) in 1991, and AusAID in 1997. By 1999, the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) introduced Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) as a par-
ticipatory, poverty-focused way of planning for development in a wide
range of countries. Interestingly, in 80% of these PRSPs, tourism is identi-
fied as an important economic sector (Mann, 2005: iv), leading to the sug-
gestion that tourism can be effectively targeted towards benefiting the poor.
This period was characterised by what many see as a consensus on pov-
erty, including the belief that poverty results from poor governance and pro-
tected economies, and that globalisation offers a path out of poverty. Thus,
blame for economies that were failing was placed squarely with those coun-
tries themselves rather than recognising the roles that outside structures and
institutions, historically and contemporarily, play in producing the condi-
tions for poverty (Erbelei, 2000). Contemporary poverty analysis has thus
overlooked the underlying causes of poverty (Green & Hulme, 2005; Hickey,
2008). The 'poverty consensus' has also been criticised in terms of its heavy
focus on economic development, while overlooking important environmen-
tal, social and political issues.
Associated with the poverty consensus are the Millennium Develop-
ment Goals (MDGs), a set of eight goals that are almost universally
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