Inequality, sustainability and middle classes in a polycentric world

Abstract

Poverty, inequality and sustainability continue to be the world’s major development challenges. One major trend in our increasingly multipolar world with more complex public–private–civic governance configurations is the rise of a significant number of middle-class citizens in low- and lower-middle income countries (Kharas and Gertz, 2010). These so-called ‘new’ middle classes in the Global South tend to be far less wealthy as compared with, for example, European middleclass consumers, but they have considerable purchasing power, and have become actors whose relevance for development cannot be ignored: these rising middle classes are both part of the problem and of the possible solutions for the world’s major developmental challenges. They are problematic because, if all ‘new’ middle-class consumers aspire to present Western consumption patterns, three planet earths would not be enough to sustain their consumptive demands. It is crucial that we identify possible avenues for more sustainable consumption patterns among the middle classes, old and new. And yet these new middle classes shed a light of hope for positive change. A vibrant civil society is also usually firmly rooted in the middle class. Activists, organizers and development scholars from the middle classes are engaged in attempts to reduce inequalities and to strengthen the responsibility and accountability mechanisms needed to galvanize developmental processes (Moore, 1966; Cheeseman, 2010). In this sense, the political, social, cultural and economic awareness and advocacy among middle classes can also be a part of a push toward less inequality and more sustainable production and consumption processes. The rise of middle classes around the Global South is part of major shifts in the distribution of economic and political power worldwide (Kaplinsky and Messner, 2008). Their growth weakens the traditional bilateral aid logic in which rich countries aid poor countries, and they help us to focus more on the dynamics of socioeconomic change within and between countries, and socioeconomic groups within societies.