Microcredit as a new phenomenon has been a recent developmental discourse and occupies a significant place in development literatures because of its prominence as a successful development model which is said to have contributed to remarkable changes in the lives of the poor people in many developing countries, particularly in Asian and African countries. It is also evident that this microcredit model of development has not just been confined to its origin of Bangladesh rather it has been replicated in many poor countries as well as some other developed countries of the world. Those countries have applied this development intervention programs and claimed to have achieved outstanding success in poverty reduction. As a promising development model the success history of Grameen Bank’s ‘minimalism’ has captured attention of scholars, triggering huge debates regarding whether, how and in what way microcredit has been an effective development model, along with how and to what extent it has brought success for the development of poor people in general, and the poor women in particular. As a consequence, microcredit phenomena have become the centerpiece of the development debate and political-economy analysis. A wealth of literature on microcredit (Khandker, 1998; Hoque, 2004; Khandker, 2005;; Molla et al., 2008; Hoque & Itohara, 2009; Mazumder & Wencong, 2013) reveals that microcredit programs in Bangladesh have been playing a major role in alleviating the poverty of rural women through self-employment and income-generating programs. The current academic discourse indicates that microcredit has been an effective and sustainable development intervention tool for tackling poverty and reducing gender inequalities as well as for improving women’s bargaining power in the family sphere through income-generation activities of the target population. The main focus of the ‘minimalist’ microcredit program interventions is to streamline poor women into the developmental process, aiming to promote equitable and sustainable social progress because
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“the emancipation of women is an integral part of social progress, not just a women’s issue” (Sen and Dreze, 1995, cited in Fernando, 1997:151).
This groundbreaking social innovation technique, therefore, for empowering poor women by incorporating them in group-based income generation microcredit programs can be considered a new orthodoxy in the development discourse (Fernando, 1997). In recognition of the unprecedented success of microcredit programs, notably in 2006 the Norwegian Nobel Committee jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Professor Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank of Bangladesh for their efforts to “create economic and social development from below” (Daley-Harris, 2009:1). Aitken (2013) argues that this process of development from below is a conversion of the ‘poorest of the poor’ into financial assets bringing them into the realm of market. The market based microcredit serves the poor people by incorporating them into credit practices that are fully ensnared within global financial markets and has been understood as a particular form of neoliberal accumulation. However, McDermott (2001) points out that microfinance itself rightly fits within the ongoing neoliberal framework, and is firmly embedded in the notion of self-reliance and the concepts of free-market capitalist approaches endorsed by the global North. Keating, et al. (2010) maintain that microcredit approaches are deeply grounded in the political rationality of neoliberalism and looks for market-based solutions to a wide range of problems like poverty and unemployment and develops a justification of individual liberty and responsibility rather than public responsibility through the application of self-help strategies.
NGOs as providers of development policies and models have been a popular vehicle for development and are considered legitimate channels for reaching the poor with vital service deliveries, which thus have gained huge recognition worldwide. At the same time, it has also sustained fierce criticism from academics and development analysts. They are serving as active agents for development and change, and hence have been preferred route through which development programs are designed and implemented. According to Fisher, NGOs are preferred by the development agencies as an alternative channel to integrate individuals into market, to deliver services, and to involve local populations in development projects (Fisher, 1997) as synchronizing their purposes, ideologies, polices, and interests with that of the neoliberal development agendas through widely recognized and extensively used poverty alleviation strategy of market-based microcredit programs. According to Flynn (2007), microcredit is one of the most appropriate ways for global financiers to access a previously untapped market, offering them the opportunities to have both profitable and attractive
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margins. NGOs in this regard function as the purveyors of neoliberalism by following and applying the policies and strategies best suited to the ideologies of neoliberal development. According to Rankin (2001), the NGO interventions of microcredit in the context of neoliberal policy of the global North can be recognized “as a state strategy that constitutes social citizenship and women’s needs in a manner consistent with a neoliberal agenda” (p. 20).
Against the backdrop of this debate, the study has made an attempt to evaluate the policies and practices of microcredit programs of two widely recognized NGOs in Bangladesh— Grameen Bank and BRAC—and the possible effects of microcredit on the lives of the poor women in rural Bangladesh. Moreover, the study has tried to explore whether poor women’s’ participation in microcredit programs could yield any remarkable outcomes for their families, and which groups of women in the villages on which the field work has been focused benefit from participating in microcredit programs. In this case, Foucault’s notions of disciplinary technologies (1977a) and governmentality (1991) have been applied as an analytical framework for delving into how women’s economic behavior is regulated by the microcredit policy of Grameen Bank and BRAC, and whether and how the control of women’s economic behavior could bring any remarkable outcomes for the alteration of their lives in the context of rural society in Bangladesh. Moreover, the two concepts of Foucault have been applied in the study in order to better capture and explain the real image of how the poor women continue to stay in the microcredit programs complying with the program discipline of the NGOs and contribute to their development through poverty alleviation and empowerment by spurring self- entrepreneurship and manage their development in a self-regulated process.
Michel Foucault (1977a) used the term disciplinary power/technology to explicate disciplinary procedures followed by the agencies, institutions, organization and programs in a particular social setting, albeit differently. Discipline is a form of power that is exercised over one or more individuals in order to develop their capacity for self-control, ability to act in concert, and render them amenable to instruction (Hindess, 1996). It is a technique which functions as continuous surveillance and sanctions punishment for those at fault. The disciplinary power/technology operates through hierarchical observation, which is the instrument of discipline. The goal of this process is to make surveillance an integral part of production and control (Foucault, 1977a). In this technology the disciplinary apparatus is a single gaze – ‘the eye of authority’ –which continuously observes everything without the visibility of the subjects (Foucault, 1977a). But the idea of disciplinary power/technology is not separate from the concept of governmentality because they are interlinked.
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Michel Foucault introduced the term ‘governmentality’ in the 1970s in analyzing political power (Rose, et al., 2006), which was “understood in the broad sense of techniques and procedures for regulating human behavior” (Foucault, 1997:82). The idea of governmentality is conceived as a mode of political rationality and a way of governing techniques directed at managing the self (Foucault, 1991). With the development of liberalism, this form of governmentality “had become the common ground for all modern forms of political thought and action” (Rose, et al., 2006: 86), and also has become “a core concept within a wide range of studies of power, order, subjectivity and resistance” (Larner and Walters, 2004:3). It is concerned with ordering people and things (Larner & Walters, 2004) by a form of surveillance, and control over the behavior of the subjects (Foucault, 1991). Governmentality has a more specific reference to a new way of thinking about and exercising power (Larner & Walters, 2004). According to Foucault, governmentality refers to the “ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power…” (Foucault, 1991:102). By the term ‘government’, Foucault means “conduct” – or more precisely ‘the conduct of conduct’ – which is a kind of activity that shapes, guides or influences the conduct of some person or persons (Foucault, 1997; Gordon, 1991; Lemke, 2000; Lemke, 2013). The “conduct of conducts” refers to the exercise of power and management of possibilities in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed (Foucault, 1982). Governmentality is therefore quite a different form of power; one that seeks to guide human beings (Lemke, 2013). As pointed out by Lemke, neoliberal governmentality not only harnesses and controls the individual’s body, but also oversees and subdues the collective body in terms of self-regulation and control by inculcating neoliberal norms and disciplines in social subjects in order to create “economic-rational individual” (Lemke, 2000:12).
Being influenced by the Foucaultian concepts of disciplinary power and governmentality, I have made effort to evaluate the microcredit policies and practices of Grameen Bank and BRAC. Both the notions of disciplinary power/technologies and governmentality have been applied to analyze the possible strategies of NGOs in the operation and management of microcredit for poor women in rural Bangladesh against the background of neoliberalism in order to understand their strategies for the development of the target groups, and to investigate how this policy approach influences the financial behavior of the clients and affects their lives. I have also analyzed social capital in terms of norms, networks and trust in order to explain the nexus between microcredit programs and the construction of social capital by the poor women
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themselves. I seek to discover whether microcredit programs have reinforced the existing social relationships among the rural poor women that contributed to the success and sustainability of programs. Furthermore, the theoretical background of agency has been applied to analyze the concept and practice of empowerment so as to understand whether poor women’s participation in microcredit programs have improved their freedom and autonomy in the households and in broader society, resulting in the improvement of intra-household gender relationships.