Rural Development, Environmental Sustainability, and Poverty Alleviation

Donors have developed new micro-level and local paradigms to address rural development,environmental sustainability, and poverty alleviation to bypass, ignore, and substitute for badly functioning and corrupt states. Yet, states still set the macro-economic, legal, and policy parameters or “rules of the game” within which other entities operate, and many non-state actors are only nominally independent. Hence, technical initiatives stemming from these paradigms, aimed at growth and equity are often theoretically misconceived and tend to fail when implemented. The paper critically discusses the new paradigms, including decentralization, civil society, microentrepreneurship, and capacity building, among others, mainly using African examples.