Despite years of spending in the name of 'development', the persistence of deep and widespread poverty in the vast majority of developing countries is far more striking than the handful of success stories. This has not stopped governments around the world making a series of bold commitments in the past few years, not just to the idea of reducing poverty but to its wholesale eradication.
Such initiatives as the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, various campaigns for debt relief and the Prime Minister's Commission for Africa indicate a growing sense of urgency about tackling this most challenging of global policy problems. The second half of this year will see a string of summits devoted to development, beginning with the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in July.
But will things be any different this time? Can today's renewed spirit of optimism in our ability to do something about world poverty be sustained by some tangible achievements? As the musician and global development campaigner Bono recently said: "We have the cash, we have the drugs, we have the science - but do we have the will to make poverty history?"
Dr Allister McGregor, Director of the ESRC-funded research group on Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) at the University of Bath, believes that there can be real progress but only if policy is based on top-quality, systematic social science. He believes that we need to raise the standards of development research, which too often has failed to focus on understanding what works in practice.
"More effective development policy and better use of technological interventions demand good social science," Dr McGregor argues. "Not only the macro statistics on growth, poverty and inequality, but also the fine-grained understanding of the distributions of resources and relationships that constitute the barriers to successful development in particular contexts. We have seen too many good technological interventions founder because they have taken inadequate account of the social, economic and political realities with which they engage.
"We need to understand why it has been so difficult to reduce the poverty of so many people throughout the developing world and what it is that keeps people poor. But while we need to be able to think universally about development solutions, we need these to be informed by the local realities of people's daily lives, because it is these realities that sustain and reproduce poverty."
WeD's ambitious programme of in-depth, comparative research is beginning to provide some of these insights by taking a fresh look at the lives of people in developing countries. The team's investigations include detailed profiles of a range of urban and rural communities in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Thailand, plus extensive fieldwork asking people about their resources and needs, and how they view their quality of life.
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