PUBLIC GOVERNANCE AND THE ERADICATION OF POVERTY: A FORWARD
| Author | Pan Suk Kim |
| Date | 01 October 2012 |
| Published date | 01 October 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.1637 |
PUBLIC GOVERNANCE AND THE ERADICATION OF POVERTY: A
FORWARD
PAN SUK KIM*
Yonsei University, South Korea
Poverty can be seen as the lack of basic material possessions for meaningful livelihood. It is often divided into
two categories: absolute poverty, the lack of ‘basic’human needs, and relative poverty, the lack of a ‘socially
acceptable’level of resources relative to others within a given society. Because absolute poverty is a much more
critical issue than relative poverty, it has become a key global issue as there are over one billion people estimated
to be living in absolute poverty around the world. The term absolute poverty is used as a synonym for extreme
poverty, and is the absence of sufficient resources to secure the basic necessities of life. The severity of extreme
poverty significantly downgrades human dignity around the world, and the slow outcome of international aid
and development efforts have become key discussion points in the global effort to eradicate poverty in many less
developed countries. For many years, various poverty reduction strategies have been introduced in many countries,
but the degree of absolute poverty is still salient in many countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia,
and South America—and now in the emergent Middle Income Countries.
At the Millennium Summit in 2000, the largest gathering of world leaders in history adopted the UN Millennium
Declaration. This has become known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), with a deadline on 2015.
However, progress towards achieving the MDGs appears to have had mixed results so far in regard to impacting
poverty on the ground. This is the case at least when examining both the aggregate statistics and progress indica-
tors. One of the challenges of a target-driven, donor-led approach is how best to embed well intended initiatives in
national government and local institutions, and how to engage with the poor and marginal groups themselves. A
number of donors have taken significant steps to address this; however, poverty and broader deprivation tend to
be reduced through the policies and programmes of national and local governments, with or without aid assistance.
It is the evolving social contract, the implementation environment, and capacity of the technocracy, which could
make the difference.
In this special edition of the Public Administration and Development Journal, we present eight papers that were
presented (some via Skype) at the Symposium on Public Governance and the Eradication of Poverty, held at the
Institute for Poverty Alleviation and International Development (IPAID) at Yonsei University, Wonju Campus,
South Korea, in October 2011 with the financial assistance from the National Research Foundation of Korea
(NRF) and Yonsei University. The purpose of the symposium was to address the role of public administration
in alleviating poverty, the role of good governance and accountability in development and poverty reduction,
and the role of successful anti-poverty policy to improve strategy implementation. Poverty is a highly complex is-
sue, and it cannot be solved by a single discipline or approach. Accordingly, multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary
approaches must be utilised for the eradication of poverty. As a matter of fact, there is plenty of literature on global
poverty, particularly from an economic point of view (Sen, 1999; Sachs, 2005; Collier, 2007; Easterly, 2007;
*Correspondence to: P. S. Kim, Institute for Poverty Alleviation and International Development (IPAID), Yonsei University, Wonju Campus,
Wonju 220-710, South Korea. E-mail: pankim@yonsei.ac.kr
Contract/grant sponsor: National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government; contract/grant number: NRF-2010-
413-B00024.
public administration and development
Public Admin. Dev. 32, 335–336 (2012)
Published online in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/pad.1637
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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