What is the micro-oriented approach?
The idea that poor people benefit more when you generate opportunities that are small in scale and low-tech. Obvious as a prescription — heretical in development.
Political Scientist · Singapore Management University
From Bhutan to Barbados, from Singapore to Switzerland — the most stubbornly successful poverty reduction has often come not from chasing growth, but from generating opportunities that ordinary people can actually reach.
Research, writing, and a book in progress by John A. Donaldson, on the micro-oriented approach to poverty reduction.
"Poor people benefit more when you generate opportunities that are small in scale and low-tech. As a prescription, that's pretty obvious. It also flies in the face of nearly everything development experts recommend."
2025–26 Sabbatical · In progress
On the road with Small Steps
Twelve countries, five continents, twenty institutions — taking the argument to the places it has been tried.
A book in progress
Small Steps
Why poor communities reduce poverty through small-scale, accessible, appropriate-technology approaches — not GUTA (Gigantism, Urbanization, Technology-for-technology's-sake, Accumulation).
Most development experts — neoliberal and Marxist alike — share a single end goal: industrialization, urbanization, technological advancement, accumulation. Small Steps argues that the places that have most consistently lifted people out of poverty have often done the opposite. They have chosen sufficiency over accumulation, community scale over urbanization, appropriate technology over high-tech.
Building on the Guizhou fieldwork of Small Works (Cornell University Press, 2011), the new book travels across continents to draw out a coherent alternative — distinguishing chosen sufficiency from forced sufficiency, primary examples from supporting ones.
Chapter anchors
Barbadosinclusive tourism development
Singaporecottage industries
Switzerlandcommunity scale
Bhutansufficiency over accumulation
Research
Seven interconnected lines of work — on China, on the conditions for inclusive growth, and on what small-scale approaches can teach us.
I · POVERTY IN CHINA
What works against poverty?
China's thousands of local governments form a laboratory for understanding what reduces poverty — and what doesn't.
→ Key paper: Small Works (Cornell University Press, 2011)
II · GROWTH & POVERTY
Growth is good for whom?
Why does economic growth sometimes fail to help the poor? Lessons from the exceptions to the growth–poverty nexus.
→ Key paper: Growth Is Good for Whom, When, How? (World Development, 2008)
III · MICRO-ORIENTED APPROACH
Opportunity at human scale
Small in scale, low in technology, within reach. An overlooked alternative with a long history.
→ Key paper: Small Steps (book in progress) (see also the foundational essay)
IV · RURAL RESTRUCTURING IN CHINA
What happens to peasants?
As rural economies modernize, what happens to peasants and small farmers under land consolidation and agribusiness?
→ Key paper: From Peasants to Farmers (Politics & Society, 2010 — ASA award winner)
V · CENTRAL–LOCAL RELATIONS
The mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away.
Decentralization in China is a constant dance between local discretion and central control.
→ Key paper: Assessing the Balance of Power in Central–Local Relations in China (Routledge, 2017)
VI · UNMET NEEDS IN SINGAPORE
Singapore has poverty, too.
Inequalities and unmet needs in a country whose narrative leaves little room for either.
→ Key paper: A Handbook on Inequality, Poverty and Unmet Social Needs in Singapore (Lien Centre for Social Innovation, 2015)
VII · OTHER RESEARCH
Projects into puzzles.
Some projects don't fit neatly elsewhere — including a paper co-authored with my father on the Russia–China arms trade.
→ Key paper: Farmers in a City State? Collective Action under Adverse Circumstances (Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2021)
Recent writing
Essays, commentary, and notes from the work in progress. See all writing →
A hundred years of revolution, China still can't take its eyes off poverty
Op-ed published with Channel News Asia.
Discussing Xi Jinping's speech on ending absolute rural poverty
A brief interview on BBC Radio's News Day.
Lies, damned lies, and Scopus
On the seductions and distortions of citation databases — from someone who has spent a lot of time reading them.