• Date: Wednesday, 22 April, 11 am – 12 noon (Melbourne time)
• Location: Hybrid — Zoom and Asia Institute Conference Room 321, Parkville
• Speaker: Associate Professor John Donaldson (Singapore Management University)
• Registration: Required via Humanitix
• Enquiries: china-centre@unimelb.edu.au

Overview

What if one way to reduce poverty involved doing the opposite of what orthodox economics recommends? Instead of scaling up enterprises, what if we supported the small and the localised? Instead of chasing high-tech production, we embraced traditional and lower-tech approaches? Instead of urbanising rapidly, we invested in the vitality of small towns and rural communities? Instead of measuring success through aggregate growth, we asked whether everyone had enough?

These questions underpin a “small works” approach to development — rooted in classical economics and grounded in real-world evidence. Drawing on fieldwork in China, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Barbados, among other cases worldwide, A/Prof Donaldson will show how small-scale, low-tech, pro-poor initiatives can significantly reduce poverty at a more sustainable pace of economic growth, inviting us to reconsider the relationship between scale, technology, community, sufficiency, and well-being.

About the speaker

John Donaldson is Associate Professor of Political Science at the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University. His research examines politics, rural development, and poverty, grounded in two decades of fieldwork in China and extended through comparative research across Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. He is the author of Small Works: Poverty and Economic Development in Southwestern China (Cornell University Press, 2011), with work appearing in World Development, China Quarterly, and the Journal of Development Studies. He is currently working on a forthcoming book, Small Steps: Exploring a Path to Sufficiency through Small-Scale, Low-Tech, Human-Oriented Initiatives.