Social Funds, poverty management and subjectification: beyond the World Bank approach

Revisiting, from a Marxist perspective, the World Bank's discourse on Social Funds, we highlight three findings. One, Social Funds gets deployed in the context of a larger Third Worldist discourse of poverty management, which in turn helps deepen the logic of capitalist development. Two, generating a class-focused understanding of Social Funds (via the concept of social surplus), we argue that class processes and need processes constitute one another and through this conduit emerges a relation between global capital and the poverty alleviation programme of Social Funds. Lastly, interrogating the management approach underlying Social Funds leads us to question claims of decentralisation and participation. Our analysis exposes an underlying process of subjectification by way of a control mechanism exercised through the code of conduct encapsulated in that managerial approach. Copyright , Oxford University Press.