Charles Gore on how poverty went global: development, basic needs, human rights and social justice in the 1970s

On 5 February Charles Gore, UNU-WIDER Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow, attended the University of Helsinki’s Development Studies Brown Bag Lunch Seminar.

Charles Gore gave a presentation on his on-going work, which seeks to reconstruct how the idea of poverty became a global concept in the 1970s.

Abstract:

Poverty became a global concept in the 1970s as modernization theory was challenged, and various alternative visions of world order were put forward in a context of deepening global interdependence. The frame shift in the conceptualization of poverty, which was articulated through the notion of basic human needs, preceded – and became intertwined with – the take-off of international human rights practice in 1977. This was a fork in the road which has led to the world we live in today. Reconstructing the history of how poverty went global then enables the imagination and design of alternative just world futures