Dados Bibliográficos

AUTOR(ES) James Ferguson
ANO 2007
TIPO Artigo
PERIÓDICO African Studies Review
ISSN 0002-0206
E-ISSN 1752-9016
EDITORA Cambridge University Press
DOI 10.1353/arw.2007.0092
CITAÇÕES 29
ADICIONADO EM 2025-08-18
MD5 7352c7f052821bf896a6765d3b801e37

Resumo

In Marginal Gains (2004), Jane Guyer traces the logic of African socioeconomic practices that have long confounded attempts by modern states to impose what she terms 'formalization.' Nowhere is the tension between pragmatically 'informal' economic life and putatively 'formal' state structures more evident than in the domain of poverty interventions, which typically aim to bring state institutional power to bear precisely on those who are most excluded from the 'formal sector.' This article offers a preliminary analysis of some new rationalities of poverty alleviation observable in recent South African political and policy discourse. I will argue that new sorts of programmatic thinking about poverty represent a new development within (and not simply against) neoliberalism, and that they seek, by abandoning the regulatory and normalizing functions usually associated with social assistance, to bring the formal and the informal into a new sort of relation.

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