Arias has spent 30 years teaching, training social workers, and engaging in research networks in Argentina. Photo: Liu Yuwei/CSST

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Eradicating extreme poverty worldwide by 2030 is a core objective of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Recently, Ana Josefina Arias, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, visited the Latin American Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where she spoke with CSST about poverty research in Argentina. She also reflected on the evolution of social work studies in Latin America and the promising prospects for China-Argentina cooperation across various fields. Arias emphasized the need for China and Latin America and the Caribbean to move beyond externally imposed models and independently explore development paths. Through academic exchanges, she believes, these regions can better recognize their respective developmental challenges, refine their policy frameworks, and foster mutual respect, learning, and benefit within the Global South.

Shift in poverty research trajectory

CSST: Could you please briefly introduce your field of research and the research topics you are currently investigating?

Arias: I am a researcher in the field of social sciences, with a degree in social work. My research interests emerged from my professional experience as a social worker. My initial questions about poverty arose during my work in social assistance programs, mainly in relation to food policies. These questions were always meant to generate knowledge for intervention, to guide practice. Together with a group of colleagues, we began to think about “poverty” in a different way, which led us to rethink how “social interventions” should be approached. The issue of poverty has become increasingly urgent over the last 50 years. There is also a kind of social emergency that makes it necessary to continue investigating this problem.

CSST: What challenges is your field of research facing right now?

Arias: The field of social work studies always has a double tension, a double question. On one hand, there is the need to increase the capacity for theoretical problematization, the need to be rigorous in terms of research and to have the ability to read new processes—to be very critical in sociological terms. On the other hand, it is a field that always has a tension about how this problematization, this research, translates into proposals for intervention. 

Thus, in recent years, I think that the approaches linked to poverty in Argentina have changed, and we have moved away from thinking about the problem of poverty in itself—its genesis, the substantive characteristics of poor people, or the problem of poverty culture or inter-generational reproduction of poverty. I believe that we have begun, perhaps not everyone, but certainly a significant group of colleagues, to think more and to question more the social responses to the problem.

In this sense, we have started to think more about all the institutions that work with poor people and the intellectual field’s proposal is for the institutionality that works on social issues in general. I think this is a positive change. I am interested in promoting such change at this time, and I think it is very necessary for the future. One of the big problems in Argentina—and, I would say, in Latin America in general, despite regional differences—is that we do not have an institutional framework design that can sustain intervention over extended periods. I think we will require this in the future, mostly because poverty in Latin America is very serious, and has worsened in some countries in recent times. 

Another major question is how the proposals for social intervention systems are linked to the existing economic models. This is an old question. However, given the transformations of our field of studies, it needs to be recurrently posed and revised. I think we will have to keep revising it in the future. 

I am inclined to think that sometimes, the need for this interconnection between the proposals of economic intervention and the proposals of social intervention does not allow for a deepening of social institutions, because it is always expected that the field of economic transformation will solve the structural problems. The social is always seen as an emergency or temporary response. I think this is something to modify in the future—national experiences that have achieved better results in terms of growth and development have done so because they have managed to institutionalize both aspects: the necessary aspects of economic transformations, and the stability of social interventions.

CSST: What are some theories, methods, or research approaches that are currently utilized in the study of social policies in Latin American countries?

Arias: Latin American scholars have made significant contributions to the study of poverty, with many innovative approaches. This gives Latin American social work, unlike other social work traditions worldwide, a relative originality. In this sense, it has not been as influenced by Eurocentrism. Moreover, some national developments, such as dependency theories, marginality theory, or certain contributions of Paulo Freire (a Brazilian pedagogue who greatly influenced social intervention forms), have allowed for a relative theoretical autonomy. 

What happened after the fall of the main Latin American dictatorships was that international financial institutions, mainly the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, offered credit to Latin American countries for social interventions or to carry out social policies. However, the financing they offered came with pre-constructed proposals on policies that countries were expected to carry out. In many cases, those strategies did not yield good results but, on the contrary, reinforced models of social exclusion. 

This experience has opened Latin American’s eyes to the need to enhance South-South cooperation and to foster the possibilities for mutual learning from other experiences, as well as increase our knowledge of other countries’ experiences—not from a place of imposition, as with the “canned” projects brought by international organizations—but from the possibility of comparative experience, of a more horizontal and fraternal learning. In this sense, I have high expectations for the work being carried out at the Argentina-China Studies Center of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, and other possibilities we may have in the future to improve mutual knowledge of the strategies to combat poverty. 

Advancing comparative studies

CSST: What are your thoughts on the future of academic collaboration between China and Latin America? And what, in your view, would constitute a successful China-Argentina academic collaboration program?

Arias: We are very interested in learning about how China managed to significantly reduce overall poverty and eradicate extreme poverty in past decades. That experience opens up many possibilities for learning. The forms of poverty are different, because mainly China has rural poverty and the forms of poverty in Argentina are more closely related to industrialization and the loss of labor conditions in urban spaces. Therefore, it is not a question of modernizing rural living conditions. So, although we have many differences, I would be very interested in knowing more about the institutions in China that carry out work on different social issues, what their methodologies are, how Chinese officials carry out their work, and what the theoretical approaches are.

I think the possibility of advancing comparative studies is of great use. Some comparative studies have been done on the topic of poverty, but I think there is still much more to learn. Particularly on the topic of poverty, I would be very interested in learning more about institutional engineering and how the Chinese government addresses poverty. In the studies on poverty interventions, the ones that have addressed the issue of poverty better are those that have moved away from focusing solely on poverty. So, interventions on poverty should not focus exclusively on “the poor,” because it makes the policy become a different policy. This might require more work, but it’s the “ABC’s” of any attempt to generate an intervention. So, how does institutional engineering foster more efficient interventions? What are the policies that are carried out? I think that it is very important to pose these questions in Argentina—questions about the institutionality—to work on social policy for the future. These are mainly questions about the state and its role, and I find them very interesting. 

Another issue that I also find interesting is being able to work on the exchange of formative proposals—the proposals of the curricula with which we teach to intervene in the different social disciplines. I think this can be very enriching, not to copy other experiences, but to look at these questions from another angle of reading, another way of understanding what we are doing. I am very interested and always looking back at my own questions, I think this possibility of reading from a new angle, from another historical experience, from another cultural expression, allows you to see things that you did not see and enriches these issues. I think we have a lot to grow in this exchange, which can provide intellectual support for building a China-Latin America community with a shared future.

CSST: How do you view China’s achievements in poverty reduction?

Arias: One of the things about this trip to China that has been very motivating for me is that, unlike other national experiences, China has many results to demonstrate that state planning is a great tool for development. Given China’s dimensions, lifting such a vast population out of poverty without taking away protagonism from the subjects themselves, from the people who participated in this process, I think it is extraordinary.

In Argentina, young children play a game called “trading cards.” By exchanging small cards with images, they make new friends. We would love to be able to do more “trading cards” with China—to know more about the experience of China. This is very relevant at the global level, where there is not the necessary degree of knowledge in other regions, at least not what I consider it deserves.

Edited by LIAN ZHIXIAN