Inside Poverty and Development in Africa: Critical Reflections on Pro-poor Policies (review)

The general ambition of this book is to argue that poor people form a highly heterogeneous social category, that few contemporary policies take this into account, and accordingly, that "pro-poor" policies are of little help to most poor people. The book contains a number of detailed case studies in eastern, southern, and central Africa, many of them inspired by an actor-oriented focus on livelihood strategies as well as a concern with the differentiating effects of agrarian dynamics on poverty.

The book is a welcome attempt to combine nuanced understandings of conditions and strategies of the poor with current policies seeking to reduce poverty. It documents convincingly that there is substantial room for improvement in internationally acclaimed policies like the International Fund for Agricultural Development's "small-farmer" model of poverty reduction and the World Bank–promoted "Poverty Reduction Strategy" papers, as well as in policies of more national or even local origin such as natural resource management programs and urban by-laws. Moreover, several chapters are highly critical of the proposition that the formalization of property rights is of any help to the poor.

Although some chapters are more concerned with the differentiations among poor people than with policy questions, and the last chapter (on the Millennium Development Goal [MDG] indicators on hunger) does not really fit the theme of the book, the variety of case studies—all discussing the relationship of policy and poverty—is a particular strength of the book. Several chapters make the point that by influencing agrarian dynamics, broad national and international processes and trends (including civil war) significantly shape the conditions and opportunities of poor people. Seeing poverty in this broad context is another important contribution of the book. Furthermore, several chapters discuss the simplistic understanding of poverty underlying many public policies. Such an understanding, typically based on quantitative, aggregate statistics, does not help policies target either the causes of poverty or the poor people themselves.

The book, however, implicitly raises two questions that are not really discussed. The first has to do with scale. The different chapters vividly document how specific groups of poor people are not included as beneficiaries of pro-poor policies, which often are based on assumptions that do not match the conditions of these particular groups. It is not clear, however, whether these observations justify the wholesale change of contemporary pro-poor policies, because other groups of poor people may indeed benefit from them, and their betterment, moreover, may have important long-term pro-poor effects despite the policies' immediate limited impact. Some of the criticisms raised in the book have to do with the conceptual understanding of poverty embedded in public policies; these criticisms clearly call for fundamental policy changes, but the case studies of particular villages, ethnic groups, landless households, and so on fail to document the magnitude of the problem.

The second question relates to alternative pro-poor policies. If the assertion is accepted that the poor are very heterogeneous, then there is supposedly a need for a similarly diverse set of policy initiatives. However, this may be neither feasible nor desirable. It is often difficult to gather political support for policies targeted at very specific groups of poor people, and such policies may be concerned excessively with addressing immediate needs rather than producing long-term structural transformation. Reflections of this kind on the policy implications across the various case studies would have been interesting.