انضباط جغرافیایی چگونه باعث تشدید فقر در جهان سوم می شود؟

Conventional wisdom informs us that poverty represents a lack of development; naturally economic development is seen as the answer to the problem. Contrary to that, I claim that poverty is a form of scarcity induced by the very process of development. The materiality of the poverty problem does not exist independent of discourses we have constructed to understand it. By concealing how development induces scarcity, social science discourse is implicated as a causative agent of poverty. Using a poststructural framework of reasoning, I demonstrate this argument by examining how mainstream geographers (in the spatial tradition) have looked at the topics of poverty and development.

Social problems do not exist in the external world independent of social science discourses that think about them. In fact discourse is implicated as a causative agent of the very problem it is designed to address. This happens at least at three levels: first, when the problem is named and defined; next, when root causes are assigned; and finally, when prescriptions are suggested. I illustrated this argument by examining how the discipline of geography looks at Third World poverty. Within geography I selected the chorology (spatial) tradition for my exercise because my interest lies not in the cutting edge of geographic research, but rather in the core, which creates public discourse. The basic chorological argument is the following: the study of the intensity of the spatial variation of a problem such as poverty can reveal the intensity of what causes that problem. Presumably areas where the problem is most experienced must also contain a high level of the causative elements, and the opposite must be true for areas where the problem is found least. I explored this idea by looking at a popular textbook on the world regional geography of the more and less developed realms. One of the self-evident axioms of the larger discourse supporting our book is that poverty is caused lack of development. So by comparing the internal characteristics of more and less developed regions one can arrive at a solution to the poverty problem. That is the main argument of the book. I made a critique by identifying several characteristics of this approach such as economism and binary opposites that are implicated in the social construction of scarcity. The point of departure for the poststructural argument was the claim that social science could not simply mirror a pre-given world, because the world is constructed by what science describes. Recognizing that is a first step towards the creation of a new, reformulated geography to engage social problems such as poverty in a useful manner.