ABSTRACT
Taking up the analysis of popular cultural representations of children and childhoods, particular attention is paid in this chapter to key policy texts concerning both international child development and international economic development. This is done through a focus on the bifurcated character of discourses of North and South and the effects of urbanisation. Here the trends noted (of young populations in the South, especially in rapidly growing Southern cities) have only intensified since this piece was initially drafted (Ansell 2005). (This is despite the ‘problem’ of ageing populations in the North-due to improvements in health and welfare-as well as how, through neoliberalism, new neocolonial inequalities are being played out outside Northern contexts.) The occlusion of the conditions of these children’s lives is shown to continue in the representations of childhood that inform the Human Development Index (HDI), a measure elaborated initially within the United Nations Development Policy (UNDP) document of 1989, coinciding also with the passing of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. Analysis here focuses on the third UNDP report of 1992 that was used to formulate World Bank Policy, including early programmes of Structural Adjustment. It therefore precedes the introduction of a Human Poverty Index (introduced from 1997) and a Gender-Related Development Index Measure and Gender Empowerment Measure added from 1995, but the latter two are still regarded as limited and inappropriately interpreted (Shuler 2006).
