“Responsibilizing” the Poor

Governing the Poor: Exercises of Poverty Reduction, Practices of Global Aid is a radical critique of efforts to reduce poverty through foreign aid. Aid, the book says, not only does not reduce poverty; it reinforces it, and it lets the governments of countries where it exists off the hook in terms of alleviating it.

This is not a diatribe like Dambisa Moyo’s ill-conceived 2009 rant, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. Moyo’s answer to poverty at every turn was free market enterprise—trade, foreign investment, microfinance. She even had a chapter entitled “The Chinese Are Our Friends.” Not so, this book. Authors Suzan Ilcan and Anita Lacey, professors at the universities of Windsor and Auckland respectively, have no time for market- and export-led growth and they see microfinance as part of the problem, not an answer. For Moyo, foreign aid subverts market enterprise; for Ilcan and Lacey, it underpins enterprise to...