About the Book

Severe poverty is one of the greatest moral challenges of our times. The current development aid framework may be seen as seeking to make globalization work for the poor; and multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank and UNDP, are powerful global actors, not only by virtue of their financial resources, but also in their role as global norm-setting bodies and as sources of hegemonic knowledge production about poverty and poverty reduction.

This book examines in depth the activities of the two major multilateral development organizations: the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme and two specific initiatives where ‘ethics’ and or human rights and poverty have been explicitly in focus: in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the Inter-American Development Bank. On the basis of these detailed empirical studies, the authors critically analyze how ethics are being, or may be, used to articulate the responsibilities of development agencies and their staff for a fair and effective way to fight and prevent poverty so as to guide and motivate their knowledge and policies. They seek to answer the question: What place, if any, do ethical thinking and questions of global justice have in the policies of organizations in the multilateral development system?

Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights will be of interest to researchers and advanced students, as well as practitioners and activists in the fields of international relations, development studies and international political economy, political philosophy, development ethics and applied ethics more generally.