ABSTRACT
The poverty of the global order concerns the production and representation of poverty in fetishized terms, and how this in turn legitimizes market rule, as institutionalized in the development industry. In eliding or reducing multiple meanings of development to a monetary standard, poverty is naturalized as a measure of material scarcity, simultaneously impoverishing development. New forms of poverty alleviation in the neoliberal era renew the legitimacy of private forms of accumulation as the engine, and episteme, of development. The effort to humanize development in light of critiques of its top-down projects and singular visions has certain trademark characteristics. The chapter argues that the development establishment bases its legitimacy on monopolizing development knowledge, so governments implement official development knowledge to accumulate power and enrich their cadres. Development as an abstract vision of progress only becomes meaningful within particular contexts of rule and inequality when broader visions are realized through multiple rationales and projected desires.
