Publication Details

Global poverty knowledge and the USA

Alice O'Connor
2006

Abstract

Among the most telling and characteristic features of U.S. poverty knowledge is one underscored by the question this paper begins to take up. The question is how, and how much an American model of poverty knowledge has come to influence if not dominate the study of poverty globally, and by extension the global development debate. The characteristic feature the question highlights is the strange combination of universalism and exceptionalism that distinguishes the dominant tradition of poverty knowledge in the U.S. from its counterparts in the developing world, and that helps to explain why its influence in the global context has been an ongoing source of concern, debate, and protest. For while U.S. poverty knowledge has historically been universalist and homogenizing in its readiness to export home-grown concepts, methods and models, ways of thinking, and forms of measurement to the developing world, it has also been insistently exceptionalist in its resistance to borrowing, or learning from, or applying concepts, models, methods, and ways of thinking about poverty generated from within the context of global development research to poverty at home.

Publication Type(s)

Conference Paper

Conference: Concepts and Methods for Analysing Poverty Dynamics and Chronic Poverty

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