Rural Development, Environmental Sustainability, and Poverty Alleviation: A Critique of Current Paradigms

Susanne Mueller

Working Papers from United Nations, Department of Economics and Social Affairs

Abstract: Donors have developed new micro-level and local paradigms to address rural development, environmental sustainability, and poverty alleviation to bypass, ignore, and substitute for badly functioning and corrupt states. Yet, states still set the macro-economic, legal, and policy parameters or “rules of the game” within which other entities operate, and many non-state actors are only nominally independent. Hence, technical initiatives stemming from these paradigms, aimed at growth and equity are often theoretically misconceived and tend to fail when implemented. The paper critically discusses the new paradigms, including decentralization, civil society, microentrepreneurship, and capacity building, among others, mainly using African examples.

Keywords: economic development; formal and informal and insitutional arrangements; development planning and policy; economic development; regional urban and rural analyses; formal and informal sectors; institutional arrangements; institutional linkages to development. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O10 O17 O18 O19 O20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2006-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-env and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:une:wpaper:11

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