The Politics of Poverty
Policy-Making and Development in Rural Tanzania

An examination of poverty dynamics and developmental failure, shifting emphasis from development as control to development as coping strategy.

Felicitas Becker (Author)

9781108496933, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 June 2019

378 pages, 11 b/w illus. 1 map
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm, 0.73 kg

'It will be of interest to any scholar wanting a more intimate and complicated portrayal of the developmentalist machine that endures in the twenty-first century in regions across the global South.' Muey Ching Saeteurn, Agricultural History

How is it that rural poverty in southern Tanzania appears both easy to explain and yet also mystifying? Why is it that 'development' is such a touchstone, when actual attempts at fostering development have been largely ephemeral and/or unpopular for decades? In this book, Felicitas Becker traces dynamics of rural poverty based on the exportation of foodstuffs rather than the better-known problems connected to exportation of migrant labour, and examines what has kept the development industry going despite its failure to break these dynamics. Becker argues that development planners often exaggerated their prospects to secure funding, repackaged old strategies as new to maintain their promise, and shifted blame onto rural Africans for failing to meet the expectations they had raised. But the rural poor, too, pursued conversations on the causes and morality of poverty and wealth. Despite their dependence and deprivation, officials found repeatedly that they could not take them for granted.

Introduction
1. The end of slavery, famine and food aid in Tunduru
2. Changing configurations of poverty in the colonial Southeast and the myth of communalism
3. The struggle to trade
4. Independence and the rhetoric of feasibility
5. Villagisation and the pursuit of market access
6. The politics of development in the era of liberalisation
7. Performing and pursuing development in Kineng'ene
Conclusion
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Rural planning [RPG], Science funding & policy [PDK], Political ideologies [JPF], Politics & government [JP], Curriculum planning & development [JNKC], Educational strategies & policy [JNF], Rural communities [JFSF], Poverty & unemployment [JFFA], Religion & politics [HRAM2], Development studies [GTF]