PRESENTATION ABSTRACT: "Social Exclusion Inside a Bilateral Aid Agency: The Use and Otherwise of the Concept, by Arjan de Haan, DFID China

This paper narrates the experience of using the notion of social exclusion within the context of working in a development agency, the UK Department for International Development (DFID). Much of this process reflects the use of any theoretical notion or concept in 'practice'. As one of the actors centrally involved in promoting the concept within DFID, I adopted an extremely pragmatic approach, happily accepting that the concept would work for some people (e.g. our work in India) and not for others (e.g. China), and I even discouraged partners from doing so, arguing that it was likely to create more confusion than help our work. Nonetheless, the experience re-enforced the extent to which it's better to have a theory than none, as otherwise all that's left is chaos: nothing is more practical than a good theory.

A key feature of this experience has been that the concept of social exclusion has come under criticism from so many and radically opposing sides, ranging from neo-classical economists (including those in the World Bank) who struggle to appreciate the nature of the social processes that the social exclusion approach seeks to uncover, to those concerned with the political effects of the concept (e.g. the problems with forcing inclusion onto 'marginal'' groups in ways that deepens the levels of exploitation and subordination they experience). Despite this, the concept has been successful to some extent in moving the development forward. Within DFID, social exclusion became a major part of the language in South Asia (while not in Africa, where 'widespread poverty' has blocked pretty much any alternative language, including 'inequality'). Outside but linked to the donor community, in India, advocacy groups pragmatically picked up the notion, particularly to refer to caste exploitation but also extended to the deprivation of 'tribes'. Within DFID, finally, a social exclusion 'strategy' appeared. This in turn became a vehicle for introducing a language of 'discrimination', and had the significant programmatic implication of committing country programmes to carry out social exclusion analyses. The paper concludes with an analysis of whether the considerable effort involved in promoting a concept such as social exclusion was worth these gains.