Sam Hickey

Adverse Incorporation, Social Exclusion and Chronic Poverty

Poverty studies frequently fail to address the underlying processes that produce and reproduce poverty over time, preferring instead a descriptive focus on its correlates and characteristics. In this chapter, it is suggested that a much closer interrogation of the linkages between the state of chronic poverty and the processes of adverse incorporation and/or social exclusion that trap people in poverty is necessary. It is also proposed that these concepts can significantly advance current understandings of chronic poverty because they compel taking issues of causality seriously and relate these directly to social structures, relations, and processes. In particular, they force the examination of the multidimensional, political, and historical nature of persistent poverty.

The Chronic Poverty Report 2008/09: Escaping Poverty Traps

Over the last five years, in an era of unprecedented global wealth creation, the number of people living in chronic poverty has increased. Between 320 and 443 million people are now trapped in poverty that lasts for many years, often for their entire lifetime. Their children frequently inherit chronic poverty, if they survive infancy. Many chronically poor people die prematurely from easily preventable health problems. For the chronically poor, poverty is not simply about having a very low income: it is about multidimensional deprivation – hunger, undernutrition, illiteracy, unsafe drinking water, lack of access to basic health services, social discrimination, physical insecurity and political exclusion. Whichever way one frames the problem of chronic poverty – as human suffering, as vulnerability, as a basic needs failure, as the abrogation of human rights, as degraded citizenship – one thing is clear.Widespread chronic poverty occurs in a world that has the knowledge and resources to eradicate it. This report argues that tackling chronic poverty is the global priority for our generation. There are robust ethical grounds for arguing that chronically poor people merit the greatest international, national and personal attention and effort. Tackling chronic poverty is vital if our world is to achieve an acceptable level of justice and fairness. There are also strong pragmatic reasons for doing so. Addressing chronic poverty sooner rather than later will achieve much greater results at a dramatically lower cost. More broadly, reducing chronic poverty provides global public benefits, in terms of political and economic stability and public health. The chronically poor are not a distinct group. Most of them are ‘working poor’, with a minority unable to engage in labour markets. They include people who are discriminated against; socially marginalised people; members of ethnic, religious, indigenous, nomadic and caste groups; migrants and bonded labourers; refugees and internal displacees; disabled people; those with ill health; and the young and old. In many contexts, poor women and girls are the most likely to experience lifelong poverty. Despite this heterogeneity, we can identify five main traps that underpin chronic poverty.

The Government of Chronic Poverty: From Exclusion to Citizenship?

Abstract Development trustees have increasingly sought to challenge chronic poverty by promoting citizenship amongst poor people, a move that frames citizenship formation as central to overcoming the exclusions and inequalities associated with uneven development. For sceptics, this move within inclusive neoliberalism is inevitably depoliticising and disempowering, and our cases do suggest that citizenship-based strategies rarely alter the underlying basis of poverty. However, our evidence also offers some support to those optimists who suggest that progressive moves towards poverty reduction and citizenship formation have become more rather than less likely at the current juncture. The promotion of citizenship emerges here as a significant but incomplete effort to challenge poverty that persists over time.

Governing Chronic Poverty Under Inclusive Liberalism: The Case of the Northern Uganda Social Action Fund

The paradigm of ‘inclusive liberalism’ that currently characterises international development places a particular emphasis on the responsibility of communities to overcome the often structural problems of poverty and exclusion. Such approaches have become increasingly controversial: on the one hand, it is celebrated by optimists as the most empowering way forward for marginal citizens, and on the other, it is derided as an abrogation of responsibility by development trustees by sceptics. Uganda provides a particularly interesting context to explore these debates, not least because it has become a standard bearer for inclusive liberalism at the same time that regional inequalities within it have become increasingly apparent. Our investigation of the flagship response to deep impoverishment in its northern region, the World Bank-funded Northern Uganda Social Action Fund, offers greater support to the sceptical position, not least because of the ways in which the more pernicious tendencies within inclusive liberalism have converged with the contemporary politics of development in Uganda. This includes a tendency to blame the poorest for their own predicament and a failure to include the North within the regime’s broader social contract.

Social protection in sub-Saharan Africa: Will the green shoots blossom?

This paper provides an overview of the recent extension of social protection in sub-Saharan Africa. It identifies two main ‘models’ of social protection in the region: the Southern Africa and Middle Africa models. It then assesses the contrasting policy processes behind these models and examines the major challenges they face as regards financing, institutional capacity and political support. It concludes that, for an effective institutional framework for social protection to evolve in sub-Saharan African countries, the present focus on the technical design of social protection programmes needs to be accompanied by analyses that contribute to also ‘getting the politics right’

The politics of establishing pro-poor accountability: What can poverty reduction strategies achieve?

ABSTRACT The Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) experiment, along with other innovations promoted by the international financial institutions over the past decade, has promised to secure pro-poor forms of accountability in relation to development policy-making. New consultative processes and new forms of conditionality each promise to re-order relationships between poor citizens and their governments, and between governments and donors respectively. Using evidence from Bolivia and Zambia, we identify three critical problems with these claims. First, there is a tendency to focus on promoting accountability mechanisms that are largely discretionary and lack significant disciplinary power, particularly those reliant on certain forms of civil society participation. Second, donors have failed to overcome the contradictions regarding the role of extra-national actors in securing accountability mechanisms within particular states. Third, there is a tendency within the PRS experiment to overlook the deeper forms of politics that might underpin effective accountability mechanisms in developing countries. Ensuring accountability is not simply a technocratic project, but rather is critical for a substantive politics of democratization which goes to the heart of the wider contract between states and citizens. The PRS experiment, as located within a broader project of ‘inclusive liberalism’, reveals little potential to address this challenge.

Turning Governance Thinking Upside-down? Insights from 'the politics of what works'

Abstract Mainstream thinking within international development around what constitutes ‘pro-poor’ forms of politics is increasingly at odds with the growing evidence-base on the politics of development. Ideological bias towards Weberian modes of governance and rational actor models of political behaviour, and a growing belief in the power of ‘evidence-based policy making’ fail to reflect the extent to which informal and patronage-based forms can sometimes play a positive role in enabling poverty reduction, as well as the fact that political elites respond to a wider range of incentives than commonly assumed, including a role for political ideology and discourse rather than evidence per se. These findings offer further support for a fundamental rethinking around the role of politics in shaping development.

The Politics of What Works in Reducing Chronic Poverty - A Synthesis Report for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands

There is a growing consensus concerning the forms of politics that are most likely to lead to successful forms of pro-poor policy, including the role of decentralisation and civil society, evidence-based policy and the opening of policy to the poor. This paper critically explores this consensus by examining the extent to which these forms of politics have underpinned actual examples of successful poverty reducing interventions. The focus here is on social protection policies, namely old age pension schemes in India, Lesotho, Namibia, and South Africa, vulnerable group assistance programmes in Bangladesh and Mozambique, and recent efforts to mainstream social protection within national development plans in Uganda and Zambia. This comparative case-study analysis reveals that the consensus bears little resemblance to the actual politics of what works in terms of implementing and sustaining policies for the poorest. A synthesis suggests the need to shift attention towards political rather than civil society, to issues of discourse and ideology rather than simply poverty data, and to a closer understanding of how political contracts for social protection might be supported and developed.

Investigating the Political Economy of Social Protection Expansion in Africa: At the Intersection of Transnational Ideas and Domestic Politics

The growing literature on social protection in Africa has tended to focus on conceptual debates, policy design issues and impact evaluations. To date, there has been relatively little systematic analysis of the ways in which politics and political economy shape policy. This paper outlines a conceptual and methodological framework for investigating the politics of social protection, with a particular focus on explaining the variation in progress made by African countries in adopting and implementing social protection programmes. We propose that an adapted ‘political settlements’ framework that incorporates insights from the literatures on the politics of welfare state development and discursive institutionalism can help frame elite commitment to social protection as an outcome of the interaction of domestic political economy and transnational ideas. This approach has the advantage of situating social protection within a broader policy context, as well as highlighting the influence of underlying power relations in society. Finally, the paper suggests a research methodology that can be employed to operationalise this approach, with a particular focus on process tracing and comparative case study research.

Chronic Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia: A Select Annotated Bibliography with Special Reference to Remote Rural Areas

The Annotated Bibliography is divided into five main parts.First, the Introduction provides a detailed guide to the content and structure of the document.Second, as the internet is now an established resource for poverty research, a concise selection of useful websites is included: Poverty Research Online. It includes a specific section on spatial aspects of poverty.Third, the Chronic Poverty Toolbox (Section 1) contains specific literature on chronic poverty, divided into four sub-sections: material that refer directly to chronic poverty and its alleviation; remote rural areas and the spatial dimensions of poverty; conceptual approaches to poverty (including social exclusion); and measuring poverty (including longitudinal and spatial approaches, with reference to some datasets).Fourth, Rural Poverty (Section 2) includes a small selection of general overviews of rural poverty, and a larger number of documents relating to key strands within current poverty research – such as conflict, risk, politics and globalisation. Three subsections focus on rural poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia generally, and India in particular.Fifth, Vulnerable Groups (Section 3) reviews the literature on a selection of groups likely to be particularly vulnerable to chronic poverty: women, people with disabilities, older people and pastoralists.This Annotated Bibliography represents an early attempt to compile and review publications and websites relevant to the study of chronic poverty, and should be used in connection with the more extensive and up-to-date set of references available via the Chronic Poverty Bibliographic Database, into which the majority of the references have been incorporated. The present bibliography has a specific focus on chronic poverty in remote rural areas, one of several cross-cutting research themes pursued by the CPRC.