Researching Poverty

Researching Poverty book by John Harriss

Mainstream poverty research – even after experts had generally accepted the need for a multidimensional view of poverty that goes beyond income/consumption measures to take account of holdings of assets and hence of longer run security (see Chambers 1988, 1992) – has generally failed to address the dynamic, structural and relational factors that give rise to poverty.

Many possible aspects of deprivation are left out of the conventional poverty measurement, and it was Chambers who argues that poverty has come to be equated with what can most readily be measured. ‘Conceptually’, he suggests, ‘professionals are caught in their own poverty trap’ (1988: 6). And when it comes to action as well, he notes that professionals also tend to focus on poverty defined in terms of lack of income, and perhaps physical weakness and isolation, rather than on those aspects of poverty that have to do with vulnerability and powerlessness, perhaps because ‘Members of elite groups … find [these] less threatening aspects of deprivation to measure and tackle’ (1992).