Abstract:
This thesis aims to critically explore the ongoing dominance and shifting nature of global liberalism on development policy and practise. This is to be achieved through an investigation of the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) approach and its relationship with rising food insecurity in Cambodia. Drawing on David Craig and Doug Porter’s concept of ‘inclusive’ liberalism, this thesis will attempt to illuminate some of the complex ways in which dominant approaches to poverty reduction and food insecurity remain embedded within, perpetuate and reinforce wider hegemonic liberal governance. Using the 2008 global food crisis as a foundation for its analysis, this thesis will attempt to demonstrate the complex relationship between global liberal ideology and development responses to food insecurity within a particular context and place. It will critically explore some of the wider political economic factors that have contributed to the current food crisis. In particular, it will focus on the historical and ongoing impacts of neoliberal structural adjustment reforms on developing country agriculture, development and poverty reduction. In this way the thesis will address the need to see the current food crisis also in connection with long-standing neoliberal development practises, and the perpetuation of these by international development organisations and their frameworks. Using Cambodia as a case study, this thesis aims to demonstrate the way in which the PRSP framework and approaches to food insecurity continue to maintain and reinforce the very structures which perpetuate certain people’s vulnerability to hunger.
