Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book explores the conditions under which social policy, defined as the public pursuit of secure welfare, operates in the poorer regions of ...the world. Social policy in advanced capitalist countries operates through state intervention to compensate for the inadequate welfare outcomes of the labour market. Such welfare regimes cannot easily be reproduced in poorer regions of the world where states suffer problems of governance and labour markets are imperfect and partial. Other welfare regimes therefore prevail involving non-state actors such as landlords, moneylenders and patrons. This book seeks to develop a conceptual framework for understanding different types of welfare regime in a range of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa and makes an important contribution to the literature by breaking away from the traditional focus on Europe and North America.
The determining condition for poor people is uncertainty. Some societies perform better than others in mitigating this uncertainty. In such societies we observe welfare regimes which reduce the ...uncertainties of the market to provide for all citizens minimum conditions for reproduction. Such societies are in a minority. Elsewhere, destructive uncertainty is more pervasive. Under these conditions, the poor have less control over relationships and events around them. They are obliged to live more in the present and to discount the future. Risk management in the present involves loyalty to institutions and organizations that presently work and deliver livelihoods, whatever the longer term cost. Strategic preparation for the future, in terms of personal investment and securing rights backed up by correlative duties, is continuously postponed for survival and security in the present––the Faustian bargain.
Motivation
A large donor‐funded programme in Bangladesh implemented multiple measures designed to graduate individuals and households out of extreme poverty. The programme was committed to lesson ...learning and advocacy. It monitored change through socioeconomic surveys, qualitative tracking methods, real time assessment and project evaluations. The qualitative tracking in particular shed light on the nature of extreme poverty and resilience.
Purpose
Is extreme poverty different from moderate poverty, and in what ways? Do the extreme poor experience more idiosyncratic poverty than structural or systemic poverty? Are the extreme poor more likely to be women and girls more socially isolated and marginalized due to their gender, thus impeding their capabilities? What support is needed to enable recovery and transformation from crises?
Approach and methods
Between 2011 and 2015, 72 life histories of households enrolled in a major poverty reduction programme were conducted, entailing repeated ethnographical engagement with informants. This showed how most households experience ups and downs in their poverty and vulnerability through time: an experience at variance with static understandings of hazards and responses. The limitations of resilience literature are thus critiqued to develop a new theory around time preference behaviour and discounting.
Findings
Experiences of extreme poverty are not solely a function of systemic, class‐based inequality, but of the varied and reinforcing ways they intersect with idiosyncratic conditions of household life cycles, dependency ratios, gender and age balance, morbidity, ethnic discrimination and social isolation. Four key factors stand out as influencing deep poverty: (a) ill health, with significant internal opportunity costs; (b) intergenerational reproduction; (c) high incidence of female‐managed and ‐headed households, resulting from male desertion; and (d) a lack of income diversity and security.
Policy Implications
Our findings provide fresh insights into policy responses to extreme poverty. These insights suggest a policy shift away from a narrow concern with graduation to a wider focus on resilience. Resilience as a poverty reduction outcome requires interventions that support individuals (micro level), target the intergenerational reproduction of poverty (meso level), and engage with wider power structures that exploit and neglect poor people (macro level). Policy‐makers need to engage more explicitly with the meso and macro levels in particular, recognizing how the three levels converge to reproduce conditions of extreme poverty.
Beginning from the framework of welfare state regimes in rich capitalist countries, this article radically redefines it and applies the new model to regions and countries which experience problematic ...states as well as imperfect markets. A broader, comparative typology of regimes (welfare state, informal security, insecurity) is proposed, which captures the essential relationships between social and cultural conditions, institutional performance, welfare outcomes, and path dependence. Using this model, different regions of the world (East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa) are compared. For many poorer, partially capitalized societies, people’s security relies informally upon various clientelist relationships. Formalizing rights to security
via strategies for de-clientelization becomes a stepping stone to protecting people against the insecurity of markets.
The history of ideas about development has its roots in mercantilist globalisation, imperialism and colonial ethnography. Progress was framed in the Enlightenment dichotomy of traditional versus ...modern, and our thinking about transitions from agrarian societies was informed by the Russian debates over extracting rural surpluses to underpin industrial growth. Development as a replication of Western transitions was subsequently critiqued with the "dependista" argument that advanced capitalist countries were "underdeveloping" poorer, ex-colonial ones. Such modes of production and structural analyses still provided alibis for elite misbehaviour, however. Recent post-modern development theory emphasises actor-oriented explanations and heralds a pluralisation of cosmologies, challenging hegemonic Western conceptions.
The maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) indicators of Pakistan depict the deplorable state of the poor and rural women and children. Many MNCH programmes stress the need to engage the poor in ...community spaces. However, caste and class based hierarchies and gendered social norms exclude the lower caste poor women from accessing healthcare. To find pathways for improving the lives of the excluded, this study considers the social system as a whole and describes the mechanisms of exclusion in the externally created formal community spaces and their interaction with the indigenous informal spaces.
The study used a qualitative case study design to identify the formal and informal community spaces in three purposively selected villages of Thatta, Rajanpur, and Ghizer districts. Community perspectives were gathered by conducting 37 focus group discussions, based on participatory rural appraisal tools, with separate groups of women and men. Relevant documents of six MNCH programmes were reviewed and 25 key informant interviews were conducted with programme staff.
We found that lower caste poor tenants and nomadic peasants were excluded from formal and informal spaces. The formal community spaces formed by MNCH programmes across Pakistan included fixed, small transitory, large transitory, and emerging institutional spaces. Programme guidelines mandated selection of community notables in groups/committees and used criteria that prevented registration of nomadic groups as eligible clients. The selection criteria and adverse attitude of healthcare workers, along with inadequacy of programmatic resources to sustain outreach activities also contributed to exclusion of the lower caste poor women from formal spaces. The informal community spaces were mostly gender segregated. Infrequently, MNCH information trickled down from the better-off to the lower caste poor women through transitory interactions in the informal domestic sphere.
A revision of the purpose and implementation mechanisms for MNCH programmes is mandated to transform formal health spaces into sites of equitable healthcare.
This is the first of a two-part paper tracking agrarian change in Bangladesh, especially since its liberation in 1971. Part 1 briefly traces agrarian relations in the East Bengal delta from the ...Permanent Settlement in 1793, in order to establish the legacy of colonial feudalism for the social structure of the region, a legacy partially shared with West Bengal and across the Bengal Presidency more widely. This legacy of sub-infeudation via a hierarchy of revenue-collecting tenure holders and petty landlords receiving rents from occupancy tenants (the peasantry) acted as a depressor upon agricultural productivity, thus setting the conditions for food insecurity and famine. This understanding, however, is distorted by the “liberation narrative” that dominated western scholarship, of a nation of small farmers that was exploited and stayed underdeveloped during the Pakistan period. This small farmer narrative was aided by action-research during the 1960s that started a programme of small farmer cooperatives in the Dhaka–Cumilla belt, a region of high soil fertility, a dense population, with minifundist or small farm holdings. In order to enhance food security post-liberation, the intent of the state was to extend the small farmer model to the rest of the country. This approach ignored the emerging evidence of the capture of cooperatives by the rich, as it did the larger context of quasi-feudalism and widespread landlessness in rural Bangladesh. The paper introduces the notion of “squared fragmentation” with plots, not just land area, divided between inheriting sons, inhibiting consolidation and thereby also inhibiting methods to optimise new technologies, especially mechanisation and the introduction of new, higher-yielding rice varieties (irri-boro). These conditions set the scene for the intrusion of capital into agriculture via contract farming, opening up the possibility of landholders becoming rentiers on plots operated by other stakeholders rather than themselves becoming commercial farmers. This proposition is explored further in Part 2, suggesting that Bangladesh represents a distinctive model of agrarian reform in contrast to more familiar land reform measures elsewhere in the subcontinent.
Outsider intervention in the lives of others is a key dimension of purposive human behaviour, involving the central concepts of power and politics in the mobilisation of resources to structure the ...distribution of resources and opportunities in other arenas. This paper explores some of the ethnography of consultant behaviour in projects, and in particular emphasises the contingency of knowledge. It focuses on how power over outcomes can be exercised in a project community with consultant actors, especially in teams of academic and commercial consultants. One way to understand the development process is as a system of outsiders and insiders in shifting communities. The consultancy role offers an opportunity for academic research into these interventionist dimensions of the development process, but only if consultancy is consciously used and justified as a research tool.
PDF
