A ‘SINful’ Approach to Poverty Reduction? Community-Driven Development and Attempting Market Citizenship in Indonesia

Abstract

This final chapter details the relationship between ‘poverty reduction’, politics and socio-institutional neoliberalism (SIN) via an analysis of a large-scale delivery device — a social development project in Indonesia which takes a radical approach to embedding SIN forms of governance.¹ Like the themes covered in the earlier case studies (market extension, participation and partnership), ‘poverty reduction’ is now found ubiquitously in Bank documents and statements. Furthermore, it intersects in an almost seamless fashion with those aforementioned themes, which are seen by the Bank as critical in realising poverty reduction. References to poverty reduction permeate through project documents and programmes as both an end-goal of and justification for particular delivery devices, which, in turn, attempt to apply the new basics with the assistance of SIN’s political technologies. Indeed, given the way the Bank uses the term, everything that the organisation does appears, in one way or another, to be related to poverty reduction. However, the link between what the Bank does (promoting market-led development with various delivery devices and political technologies) and substantive poverty reduction is a point of significant contention.² It is therefore appropriate that this final case study chapter takes a critical look at the concept, being as it is both ‘all-enveloping’ and controversial.