Governing development: neoliberalism, microcredit, and rational economic woman

Abstract

This paper addresses the emergence of microcredit programmes as a preferred strategy for poverty alleviation world-wide. Taking the paradigmatic case of Nepal, it engages a genealogical approach to trace how Nepalese planners' enduring concerns about rural development intersect in surprising (and gendered) ways with donors' present focus on deepening financial markets. In the resulting microcredit model, the onus for rural lending is devolved from commercial banks to subsidized 'rural development banks' and women borrowers become the target of an aggressive 'selfhelp' approach to development. As a governmental strategy, microcredit thus constitutes social citizenship and women's needs in a manner consistent with neoliberalism. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper also considers the progressive and regressive possibilities in the articulation of such constructed subjectivities with local cultural ideologies and social processes. Such an investigation can in turn provide a foundation for articulating a more normative agenda for development studies – grounded in the perspectives of those in subordinate social locations.