Assisting the rural poor: Moral understandings, microfinance, and international voluntary efforts in southwestern China

Microfinance has often been designated as the domain of cost-benefit analysis and utility calculations. However, the moral understandings specific to each of the participants, not just religious groups, are deciding factors over outcomes in global assistance to the poor.;Based on interviews and fieldwork, this dissertation explores how moral understandings affect international aid in a rural county in southwestern China where people barely live above subsistence despite economic growth in other areas of the country. It examines the moral understandings of all participating parties---donors from across the globe, international voluntary organizations, local administrators, and recipients---and why they matter.;I explain the failure of the standard group-lending microfinance program in the field site by identifying incompatibilities among the meanings understood by different parties involved. Social-collateral structures have been designed by policy makers and funded by donors who measure everything by monetary value, including the sanctions they expect borrowers to apply to each other to gain access to loans. However, in the field site, sanctions are part of the cultivation of social relationships, an inviolable part of one's identity; they are not exchangeable for money. Gifts, labor, and collective work, however, are. An innovative social-collateral structure devised in the field site relies on guarantors, and I argue that this is more compatible with the social context of rural China.;The second subject of the dissertation centers on moral understandings and organization-level relationships. I show that organizational origins and ideologies help determine how international nonprofit organizations approach the state. I also suggest that international voluntary organizations have the ability to help both the Chinese state and the rural population express their collective values in the mid-2000s.;Finally, the dissertation concludes with two theoretical arguments. First, it makes a case for understanding what is exchangeable for money in analyses of microfinance and other incentive-based policies. Second, it argues that sets of moral understandings focus on specific social units that individuals see themselves in relation to. Individualism focuses on the one-person unit, while in dyadic ethics, morality depends on the two-person unit (the dyad).