La lucha contra la pobreza, un problema internacional

Abstract

The article reviews seven decades of development aid and the fight against poverty as perceived first through a global understanding of «poor» countries and then through a growing awareness of the disparities between countries and of the internal social inequalities within them. It covers periods as different as the beginnings of the Cold War and decolonization, the development decades of the 1960s and 70s under the influence of Keynesian ideas, until the hegemony of neoliberalism and finally the announcement of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000. In the last part of this essay, a brief retrospective of the history of development aid in Bolivia, from the Bohan Plan until the current process of change, illustrates the encounter between global norms of development created at an international level and national history. This exercise highlights the recurrent character of the debates on the volume of aid, its effectiveness, its targeting criteria, the effects of opportunism and the ongoing dependency of «developing» countries. It raises questions about the function of development aid in international relations: is it an effective instrument of «fight against poverty» or an instrument for controlling the threats, whether real or imagined, coming from poor countries and maintaining peace and the status quo between the powerful?

Keywords

• Bolivia
• development
• fight against poverty
• inequalities
• international relations