3. The anti-poverty policies: Participation, empowerment and co-responsibility
During 1970?s and 1980?s the anti-poverty policies were mainly characterized by the entrance of the private sector as a social services provider. Certainly the trend of flexibilization of labour and the de-regulation policies, created new issues related with the enhancement of the informal sector, the contributive social welfare systems, and increasing levels of poverty. During the 1990?s the anti-poverty programmes turned more sensitive on these problems and shifted the aims, strategies, and understanding of poverty creating new institutional architecture to face new challenges inherited from the 1970?s structural adjustment reforms.
Certainly, more contextual-based…
The rights sequencing thesis: Guillermo O?Donnell
Following the historical interpretation of T.H. Marshall, O’Donnell identifies a logical sequence among rights conquests in many Northwest developed countries. For most of them, the path started with the achievement of civil rights as a pillar to reach political and finally social rights. For many Latin American countries the path has been different, achieving first political rights, and then, in a very poor and incomplete way, civil and social rights (O?Donnell, 2001: 604).
Given the existence of political rights, O?Donnell raises the questions whether it is possible or not take advantage of this democratic platform to reach and enhance the civil and social rights. His answer tends to be optimistic and positive, in the sense that political rights could be an effective vehicle to reach the other two types of rights. For O?Donnell, the main problem revolves around political rights and, consistently, Latin America has accumulated a sufficient level of democratization to tackle the main barriers on civil and social…
5. Anti-poverty Neoliberal policies and its specific citizenship idea: recalibrating the role of social rights in development.
The social rights have not being forgotten by governments and multilateral organisms during the neoliberal era. Certainly, what O?Donnell calls the “social authoritarianism” has been contested by anti-poverty programmes that have become more sophisticated, complex, comprehensive and ambitious. The critical point is that such actions on poverty issues are modifying the way in which the poorest sectors of developing societies are exercising its agency capacity and its political rights (the constitutive role of institution, under Chang?s perspective). In other words, a certain type of citizenship is being created. Such a specific citizenship, has lessened the political capacity of poorest populations and has distorted the democratic and political rights in developing countries. Under these conditions, democratic regimes become more into a status quo reinforcement mechanisms,…