“We have our own Development Vision”: Poverty and Prosperity in Andhra Pradesh

“We have our own Development Vision”: Poverty and Prosperity in Andhra PradeshOliver MaxwellA three way dispute between environmental campaigner George Monbiot, the Minister for International Development, Clare Short, and a group of Indian farmers recently appeared in the letters pages of The Guardian. The dispute concerned the future development trajectory of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The protagonists each claimed to represent the interests of the poor, yet each describes very different future paths to prosperity. Ironically, these divergent paths even originated within the same conceptual framework. I begin this paper by briefly exploring the shape and genealogy of the two visions referred to above. I do this in order to show how planners came to understand the importance of historically embedded social relations in pro-poor development. With this in mind, I ask how it is that both the DFID supported Government of Andhra Pradesh (GovAP) and the coalition of Indian farmers draw on the same body of neo-populist literature and yet reach very different conclusions. This becomes the starting point for a critical evaluation of ‘sustainable livelihoods’ approaches to poverty and development. I argue that the conceptual framework of livelihoods approaches, as they are applied in this context, fails to engage adequately with concepts of exclusion, with notions of identity and an idea of modernity. This masks important lessons about the vulnerability of the poor to robust constellations of power and control embedded in processes of realising visions of progressive change.