The empty rhetoric of poverty reduction at the base of the pyramid

By Saurabh Arora, Ha Henny Romijn. 2012

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article criticizes recent Bottom (or, Base) of the Pyramid (BoP) approaches for ‘cancelling out politics’ by obscuring unequal power relations at different societal levels and painting an optimistic picture of win-win outcomes that will make (some of) the world’s biggest corporations richer while simultaneously adding a few crucial pennies to the pockets of the poor. The article is thus positioned within a growing stream of literature critical of BoP ideas, but it goes further than existing critiques by arguing that the current BoP discourse serves an important ideological function for global capital, specifically producing a discursive depoliticization of its corporate interventions in the lives of the world’s poor. We argue that the poverty-reduction outcome of a BoP venture is contingent on its practice on the ground, which will inevitably be shaped by local and global power relations. In particular, we point to three cultural-political issues overlooked by the BoP discourse, which are vital in understanding the practice of business ventures at the BoP: adverse power relationships within poor communities; social-epistemological hierarchies between the poor and outsiders who administer poverty-reduction interventions; and local vulnerabilities induced by global currents in products, services, information and ideologies.

Subfields: Anthropology, Business and International Management, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d863013c9569f42be61c6b046e5deebecccb7453

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Citations in the corpus

Customer experience challenges: bringing together digital, physical and social realms (2018, background): “For example, for-profit business objectives (and sometimes non-profit objectives) may not match the goals of individuals in markets with scarce or unevenly distributed resources due to cultural/ political issues related to power structures (Arora and Romijn, 2011).”
Framing inclusive innovation within the discourse of development: Insights from case studies in India (2018, background): “…market participation, critics argue, it neglects the power relations that shape the processes and impacts of technological change and innovation on the ground, whilst side lining the socio-economic causes of poverty and exclusion (Arora and Romijn, 2011; Levidow and Papaioannou, 2017;Peredo, 2012”
Microfinance and the business of poverty reduction: Critical perspectives from rural Bangladesh (2017, background): “Economic measures of poverty may reflect the structural aspects of poverty but do not capture the cultural, social and psychological dimensions of poverty and more importantly precludes any kind of agency to the poor by ignoring their survival strategies, social relations and practices of resistance”
How Frugal Innovation Promotes Social Sustainability (2016, background): “Criticism includes arguments such as it “presents a romanticized view of the poor, grossly underemphasizes the critical role and responsibility of the state in poverty reduction and ignores the vulnerability of the poor and underemphasizes the employability of the poor” [49,66–68], “obscuring unequa”
Crafting Sustainable Development Solutions: Frugal Innovations of Grassroots Entrepreneurs (2016, background): “Other scholars claim that a development discourse based on market-based approaches and technology transfer reflects and promotes neoliberal hegemonic thinking in developing countries [50,51].”
A Systematic Review of the Bottom/Base of the Pyramid Literature: Cumulative Evidence and Future Directions (2020, background): “Yet, despite the great fanfare surrounding the launch of the BoP approach in 2002 and its potential to address what is arguably one of the world’s most complex problems, there is little evidence to suggest that the BoP approach has delivered on its original promise of alleviating poverty through pro”
Upscaling of business model experiments in off-grid PV solar energy in India (2012, unknown): “There is very little evidence on the ground that such base of the pyramid approaches can actually produce win–win results at the required massive scale (Arora and Romijn 2011).”