{"id":32188,"date":"2021-04-11T09:42:41","date_gmt":"2021-04-11T09:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/caus.org.lb\/?p=32188"},"modified":"2023-11-14T10:15:42","modified_gmt":"2023-11-14T10:15:42","slug":"a-digital-seminar-with-adib-nehmeh-on-his-book-development-and-poverty-a-critical-review-of-concepts-and-measuring-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caus.org.lb\/en\/a-digital-seminar-with-adib-nehmeh-on-his-book-development-and-poverty-a-critical-review-of-concepts-and-measuring-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"A Digital Seminar with Adib Nehmeh on his book “Development and Poverty : A Critical Review of Concepts and Measuring Tools”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Center for Arab Unity Studies held a digital seminar on the afternoon of Saturday April 10, with the author Adib Nehmeh on his book Development and Poverty : A Critical Review of Concepts and Measuring Tools,<\/strong> issued by the Center. The symposium was followed by more than 70 participants from economists, researchers, academics and interested people from different Arab countries through Zoom and the Center\u2019s Facebook account. It also featured a series of interventions and questions. The dialogue, which lasted for more than an hour and a half, was moderated by the researcher at the center, Obada Kasar.<\/p>\n

Kasar introduced the Lebanese researcher Adib Nehmeh, who worked as a consultant in development, social policies and combating poverty for the United Nations and ESCWA program for decades, and also contributed to designing a guide to “basic unsatisfied needs for measuring poverty” in Lebanon and Arab countries, and other contributions that are concerned with the issue of poverty and combating it. He is a lawyer, holds a BA in Philosophy and a Masters in Sociology, and has numerous books, articles and published contributions. Kasar explained that the idea of the book came in the context of his long work with international organizations.<\/p>\n

She also presented the book, saying that it is of particular importance because it follows a critical and controversial approach and reviews a number of studies, which is of direct benefit to students, policy makers and their advisors, given the concrete examples it contains; pointing out that it contains a review of 35 studies and reports on poverty that were published from the 1990s to 2019.<\/p>\n

Kasar said that the discussion about the book is gaining increasing importance because it approaches poverty in a more comprehensive framework, bypassing economic discussions, to embrace broader fields that affect health, the environment and politics; and restores consideration for philosophy and ethics. She considered the book an “innovative Arab contribution to global development studies,” which are rarely published in the Arab world.<\/p>\n

The dialogue with Nehmeh covered several issues. He talked broadly about the difference between growth and development, and the substitution of the concept of “sustainable development” in place of the concept of “human development” that prevailed in the nineties of the last century. He explained that after the concept of “human development” came to introduce an environmental and social dimension to the paths of economic development, it was eroded by the acquisition of multinational companies. The author stressed that development is not limited to the economic dimension, but also includes social, environmental, political and cultural (knowledge) dimensions. \u201cIt is meaningless to talk about development if we neglect the political and cultural aspects,\u201d as he said, stressing that they are neglected globally today.<\/p>\n

The author also elaborated on the “development decision” that is now in the hands of “capitalist countries” instead of international organizations, and the relationship between developing countries and the United Nations system and international laws on development.<\/p>\n

Nehmeh also criticized the “poverty measuring tools” revealing their flaws, including the “Oxford Multidimensional Measuring Tool” and the “World Bank Measuring Tool”, explaining that they give surprisingly unrealistic results that cannot be generalized to all countries and regions as is done today. He considered that “It was found that they sometimes have very low thresholds.. making them only valid for measuring extreme poverty in areas of displacement and war, or in rural areas and remote areas..”.<\/p>\n

According to Nehmeh, perhaps the most prominent flaw in approaching the issue of poverty and combating it is that the industrialized countries which determine “what poverty is” do not have this\u00a0 poverty; this led to the inability to understand the phenomenon, adding that “the World Bank’s approach is short of understanding and addressing poverty”. He also explained that “inequality is another aspect of poverty because large proportions of people are impoverished due to mechanisms of inequality in the distribution of wealth”.<\/p>\n

And on the subject of the Corona pandemic at the end of the seminar, the author considered that the way that country leaders dealt with the pandemic giving priority to property rights and corporate profits at the expense of people’s lives revealed “the failure of the economic system, as well as the failure of the civilizational model, societal organization model and values’ \u200b\u200bmodel imposed by globalization and brutal neoliberal capitalism, which are governed by the principle of utility”. He added, “the trend after Corona is to reproduce the current economic system with the same variations, while the real exit (from the global economic crisis) is only through solidarity and justice …”.<\/p>\n

The book Development and Poverty: A Critical Review of Concepts and Measuring Tools<\/strong> by Adib Nehmeh, was published last January by the Center for Arab Unity Studies, in cooperation with the \u201cArab NGO Network for Development\u201d.<\/p>\n

you can get the book by clicking here\u00a0 Development and Poverty : A Critical Review of Concepts and Measuring Tools<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

you can watch the full seminar here:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n