The first target of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was met in 2010, as the global poverty rate of $1.25 a day fell in 2010 to less than half the 1990 rate. This was achieved largely as a result of the huge leaps made by China in bringing people out of extreme poverty (lifting more than 500 million people between 1990 and 2010). China achieved this remarkable success through a focus on a blend of economic and political practices based upon, and subsequently increasing, economic and political empowerment
The MDGs cover a range of different objectives including health, gender inequality and education, but ultimately these objectives are all designed to eliminate extreme poverty. This single minded and narrow focus is a potential problem in achieving Ban Ki Moon’s ambitions of setting “the course for the world’s efforts to alleviate extreme poverty by 2015”. Presumably in order to create agreement between the member states, these goals were almost solely a-political and thus restricted to economic ends. As such, they left out political empowerment which is often argued to be necessary to readdress the unequal power structures and exploitative relationships which exacerbates and often maintains absolute poverty.
But what is political empowerment? It is largely taken to refer to an individuals agency in making choices and taking an active role in the formation of their own life. This stems from the Aristotelian idea of political life as being integral to realise ones existence to its fullest. However, the emphasis differs to the modern conception and understanding of the importance of political life where choices are valued for both their intrinsic and instrumental value.
Instrumentally, political empowerment is important as it allows for a control of resources and regulatory bodies and is thus integral to get themselves out of poverty as they can take a role in the decision making process and influence future policy formation. Political empowerment is then partly a necessary tool to increase economic empowerment to, at least, a basic subsistence level- something which the Millennium Development Goals are designed to achieve. Thus political empowerment is an individual’s opportunity to make decisions affecting their lives at a political level.
A focus on the relationship between economic empowerment without the need for political influence is increasingly examined and discussed due to the rise in dominance of China at a global level and it’s continued, and largely unexpected, domestic stability. This stability stands in contrast to much academic literature which asserts that economic empowerment without political choice will either reach a saturation point; at which point individuals will demand a voice at a political level to increase their economic wellbeing, or will enjoy the choices available to them at an economic level and want this choice to extend to other areas of their life.
Thus far, the growth in China has not coincided with much of a call for an increase in political empowerment. There are suggestions that, certainly amongst the middle class, there is “not just the lack of political opposition to the regime but (in their view) a degree of support for a party-state operating under difficult conditions.” This coincides with statistics which suggest that despite more than 90% of Chinese citizens believing that democracy would suit China the Chinese Communist Party remains powerful and respected. Not only this, but the Party is widely regarded as a vital actor in the ongoing democratisation of China with regard to a greater say in political decisions to ensure increased representation rather than a western style liberal democratic structure with a large number of lobby groups and parties able to set the agenda.
Looking at China, we can conclude that political empowerment is interlinked with economic empowerment but is perhaps more complicated than a merely causal relationship. There is some discussion as to whether the MDG’s touch on this idea of political empowerment already. It appears that they do; in the third goal which pledges to ‘promote gender equality and empower women’, the UN members have allowed themselves to tie in the importance of political representation (and therefore empowerment) with economic empowerment when they argue for the need for an end to the discrimination of women in participation in government. This suggests that the belief in the importance of political empowerment when trying to reduce absolute poverty exists but it is more implicit. This is probably due to the difficulties in promoting political empowerment in an apolitical way.
The interconnected nature of economic and political empowerment appears in a lot of discourse around development and it was therefore slightly surprising that the UN member states didn’t do more to incorporate them when determining the Millennium Development Goals. Looking forward, while the next goals do not need to be decided until September 2015, before then some serious questions need to be asked concerning the direction the UN member states wish to take to pursue the aim of eradicating poverty.
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