From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

FROM POVERTY TO POWERSHOCKS AND CHANGEFor better or worse, shocks, whether wars, natural disasters, oreconomic crises, change history, but most development thinking isessentially gradualist, attempting to promote reform and progresswithin existing institutions and systems. It therefore ignores thepossibility of sudden shifts and struggles to understand the linkbetween social and political upheaval and change. The World Bank,for example, portrays war as ‘development in reverse’, whereas conflicthas unpredictable consequences for development, triggering anythingfrom human catastrophe and state collapse to economic modernisation– for example in Mozambique, where war accelerated a shift fromsubsistence to waged agriculture. 158Moreover, the weeks and months after a conflict ends are a crucial‘moment of opportunity’ when, amid the chaos of disarmament,often violent elections, and feuds over political power, new institutionstake shape, resources are allocated, and the peacetime orderemerges. It is then that previously marginalised voices can makethemselves heard – but they are all too often ignored, missing a chanceto engage still-emerging political systems in tackling inequality andexclusion.Disasters are also ‘political moments’that can make as well as breakmovements for change. They highlight corruption and political bias:in Nicaragua, popular outrage at the theft of relief money by theSomoza dictatorship after the earthquake of 1972 was a ‘tipping point’286