• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

THE WORLD BANK’S RISK MANAGEMENT APPROACH TO POVERTY AS A FORM OF NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY? THE CASE OF “THE SOCIAL RISK MITIGATION PROJECT” IN TURKEY BY MELTEM YILMAZ ŞENER DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Zsuzsa Gille, Chair Professor Mahir Saul Associate Professor Behrooz Gharamari-Tabrizi Assistant Professor Brian Dill Associate Professor Manisha Desai, University of Connecticut ABSTRACT In the 2000/2001 World Development Report, the World Bank offered a new approach named ‘social risk management’ for poverty reduction. The World Bank documents present the aim of social risk management as to provide instruments to the poor and the vulnerable to decrease the impact of being exposed to risk. The empirical focus of this project is the Social Risk Mitigation Project (SRMP) in Turkey, which is a World Bank project that depends on the social risk management framework. Through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this study considers the World Bank’s implementation of the ‘Social Risk Mitigation Project’ by locating it at the intersection of the broad bodies of literature on development, globalization, risk, neoliberalism, and neoliberal governmentality. Here, by doing an ethnographic study, I explain what kind of activities the World Bank executes under a social risk management project, how different actors (World Bank consultants, state institutions and officials, NGOs, scholars, etc.) get involved in the implementation, what kind of power relations take place between these different actors, in which directions institutions are changed, what kind of subjectivities are formed, how local factors and processes intervene, and what kind of (especially unintended) consequences emerge as a result of project implementation. Although development interventions can fail in their own terms, they still have regular effects which may be very different from what was initially intended. Therefore, when I refer to the impacts, I consider both the intended and unintended impacts of the project. I explain some major unintended consequences that have emerged after/due to the execution of this project in Turkey. I contemplate on the consequences of the establishment of a Project Coordination Unit (PCU) by the World Bank to implement the project and demonstrate that creation of such a private body under a public institution leads to significant power ii struggles. I also explain how the Justice and Development Party (AKP), as a party that redefined social assistance as charity by incorporating Islamic values with neoliberalism, benefited from the SRMP for increasing its public support and how the AKP’s use of this project for its political aims further brought about the creation and spreading of discourses about the poor, the Kurdish population, and the emergence of a culture of poverty in the country. Finally, relying on my interviews with the scholars who did research within the context of the Social Risk Mitigation Project, I elaborate on the question of whether or to what extent this experience of producing knowledge for the World Bank plays a part in the reconstruction of scholars, or in this case Turkish scholars, as neoliberal subjects. I argue that although the researchers are in a position to act as neoliberal subjects in their knowledge production activities, it won’t be accurate to say that they have become neoliberal subjects as a result of this experience. I aim to go beyond describing the unintended consequences of the project and answer the question of why these unintended consequences matter. I argue that outcomes that might appear as side effects of an intervention to alleviate poverty might, according to another perspective, be considered as unintended but instrumental elements in the formation of a configuration that exerts a depoliticizing effect. These outcomes, although not planned or intended, have all been instrumental in depoliticizing poverty and the poor in the country. However, my study of the case of the SRMP also demonstrates that while there is depoliticization at one level, we can also see repoliticization taking place at another level. While the consequence of the project at the level of the recipients has been a depoliticization, what happened at the level of the state officials can be considered as an instance of repoliticization. Both the officials working in the central government institution, SYDGM, but especially the officials working in the local SYDVs became resistant against the World Bank and the upper level administrators who make the iii decisions to borrow from the World Bank. I also consider what the unintended consequences of this project mean for the World Bank. Although to the general public, the project was presented in a very positive light, if we consider the millions of people who were actually involved in the project whether as implementers or recipients, for many of them, this is either money coming from a source that they do not identify or money they receive irregularly after going through a burdensome process. Not only for these recipients, but also for the local implementers of the project and the state officials who are working in the related state agencies, this project certainly has not created a positive image of the World Bank. This will, without doubt, have negative consequences for the implementation of other World Bank projects in the future. iv To Do ğu and Serkan and To that little candle inside me that never stops burning v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor, Zsuzsa Gille, for her guidance during the process of doing field research and writing the dissertation. I would like to thank Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi for providing me feedback on my dissertation. I also would like to thank the other members of my committee, Mahir Şaul, Manisha Desai, and Brian Dill. My thanks also go to the Department of Sociology for providing me a fellowship which made it possible for me to complete this dissertation. Special thanks go to the people that I interviewed or met during my field research in Turkey. I am grateful to them for sharing their experiences, feelings, and thoughts with me. I must acknowledge as well my friends who supported my research and writing efforts. I especially would like to thank all my friends in Turkey who supported me through various means of communication. Finally, I would like to thank my husband for being with me throughout this long process. And I especially would like to thank my son, Do ğu, for being such a good boy. I wrote this dissertation during the first nine months of his life. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER 2. THE SOCIAL RISK MITIGATION PROJECT………………………..50 CHAPTER 3. INTEGRATION OF ISLAMIC VALUES WITH NEOLIBERALISM: SOCIAL ASSISTANCE AS CHARITY………………………..96 CHAPTER 4. THE WORLD BANK’S IMPACT ON ACADEMIA………………...138 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………..177 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………......191 APPENDIX A. ABBREVIATIONS………………………………………………….212 APPENDIX B. INTERVIEWS……………………………………………………….213 vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION “Assisting the poor is a means of government; a potent way of containing the most difficult section of the population and improving all other sections.” (quoted in Procacci 1991, p.151) For a researcher who wants to do research on a World Bank project, the name ‘Social Risk Mitigation Project’ given to a poverty alleviation project seems appealing even at the first sight. After getting the small piece of information that the project was implemented after an economic crisis in Turkey, it becomes even a more interesting case to study. When I first heard the name of the project, the idea of the World Bank mitigating or helping to mitigate social risk by a project after an economic crisis in a neoliberal economy brought to my mind several questions and thoughts about the role of the Bank, what is meant by social risk, and how the Bank manages the crises of neoliberalism. What this name implied to me was the Bank helping the government so that social unrest would not turn into a ‘social risk’ and this seemed like an obvious validation of the role of the Bank in managing the reactions of the disenfranchised masses and governing poverty. My decision to study the ‘Social Risk Mitigation Project’ was primarily based on the interest stirred by the name of the project and what this name implies. A brief research made it clear to me that this was not a random name chosen for a project but rather derived from a World Bank framework for poverty alleviation. In the 2000/2001 World Development Report, the World Bank offered an approach that considered different dimensions of poverty and a more extensive program for poverty reduction. In this report, a new approach named ‘social risk management’ was proposed. 1 Although there are many scholars who have written on the World Bank’s involvement in poverty alleviation in general, this approach and its implications have, so far, been studied by only a few scholars. In the World Bank documents, social risk management is described as seeking to provide instruments to the poor and the vulnerable to decrease the impact of being exposed to risk. Its aim is declared as helping them to change their behavior so that they can exit poverty and lower their vulnerability. This framework includes not only ‘risk coping’ strategies that reduce the impact of risk once it takes place, but also ‘risk prevention’ and ‘mitigation’ strategies that intend to address the risk before it occurs. There is now a Social Risk Management Group under the World Bank, which works to “…extend SRM as a conceptual framework to guide and link social protection activities, and to develop practical tools to assist in the implementation of the SRM framework to support the World Bank’s mission of poverty alleviation.” (www.worldbank.org/srm ).

Load more

  224

Copy Link