The Politics of Indifference and the Poverty of Policy

Abstract

This chapter positions the disability experience within the institutional¹ scenario. It does not seek to provide a comprehensive picture of this landscape in Guatemala but simply an institutional outline emerging from disabled people’s accounts, and which serves to, at least partially, frame, compensate and contextualise the analysis and narratives presented in the previous chapters. This is critical in positioning and understanding how disability and poverty are constructed and impacted (if at all) institutionally and discursively in rural Guatemala, and how they are experienced and lived and how they interact and even transition over space and time. It is surprising how much work on disability and development continues to ignore politics and political processes when these determine if and how policy discourse is constructed and understood (or not) and if and how policies, including the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), are known, interpreted, implemented and enforced, if at all. Carothers and de Gramont (2013), for example, emphasise how the gross ambitions of development aid (including peace) are too often shot down by the lack of planning and accounting for macro and micro political issues and the barriers and possibilities they impose. Disability and poverty are not only social and embodied, they are political, politicised and politicising.