Chapter Four - Poverty Surveys and Conclusion.
4.1 Introduction.
Poverty surveys have a long history. In Europe, they have been carried out for more than two hundred years. The first surveys were carried out in the eighteenth century France and until the second half of the twentieth century the major place where they were carried out was Europe and the United States. It can be stated that they are a phenomenon characteristic of modern Europe. For the first time in human history, scientific methods were used to identify and solve social problems, a sign that the elites, the government, and later, the international community, were getting concerned with the living conditions of the poor. In the majority of cases, those surveys defined poverty in terms of consumption and only in some cases concentrated on other aspects of human well-being. If it is acknowledged that they have provided the elites with the necessary information and have provided a shift of focus towards the needs of the poor, the poverty surveys can be said to have been successful. In the second half of the twentieth century poverty surveys started to be carried out in regions outside the North-Atlantic. They were commissioned by post-colonial independent governments and new international development organisations. Similar to those of Europe, they defined poverty as an inadequate consumption, especially of food.
From an intercultural point of view, the last twenty years of the twentieth century are the most important. During this period of time, there has been a growing attention to the problems connected to crossing of the cultural borders. There was an increasing awareness of the fact that application of North-Atlantic methods of poverty research in other regions of the world does meet with serious methodological, social and political problems, related to those intercultural problems. Despite the fact that economic and social structures of all societies of the world were starting to converge towards the North-Atlantic one, they continued to possess locality specific characteristics. Those latter characteristics have remained beyond the scope of the North-Atlantic research. In this period of time many authors also started to realise that the strong bias on consumption was not adequate to describe and confront poverty in the South but also in the North (a/o. Sen, 1987). Development defined merely in terms of a growth of national income has been criticised. New indexes of human well-being emerged. Low consumption was recognised rather as an outcome of poverty than as its internal characteristic (Maxwell, 1999: 2).
Those developments had an impact on poverty surveys. Various international organisations appeared to recognise points of criticism towards consumption surveys, and already in the 1970s started to include new models of poverty, focusing on basic human needs, vulnerability, capabilities and functioning or social exclusion in their surveys (Maxwell, 1999: 2). Indicators focussing on living conditions, social environment, degree of support in times of hardship, or freedom of choice became just as important as income. Authors most aware of the intercultural problems realised that those changes are not yet sufficient. They advocated the use of a participatory poverty approach, which would allow the poor population to voice out their problems and concerns. In the 1990s, such poverty studies were carried out for the first time by international organisations. The survey designers were meant to listen to the voices of the poor and the North-Atlantic nature of the surveys was supposed to be broken down in this manner. Thus, there was a chance of providing of an intercultural knowledge of poverty. World Development Report 2001 and some poverty surveys undertaken by the World Bank in Africa in 1990s are examples of research that makes use of participatory research.
This last chapter will describe the ways in which the economic poverty research is carried out in practice nowadays. It will expose the technical as well as intercultural problems that those approaches are facing. The first section will describe the major characteristics and setbacks of the income/consumption poverty research, the second, the social indicators research, and the third, the participatory one. This section will be followed by a critical discussion of the possibility of combining the ‘income/consumption’ approach and the participatory approaches. It will be examined whether such combinations are theoretically possible and whether they can be successful from an intercultural perspective. While making an attempt to answer the second question of this thesis, it will be considered whether the social indicators and participatory approaches are capable of generating intercultural knowledge.
4.2
Income/consumption approach.
The income/consumption approach is nowadays still one of the most popular kind of poverty assessment (Schaffer, 1996: 23). It is praised for its simplicity, ease of application, relatively low costs and a good level of aggregation of the data. From the methodological point of view, this approach is connected to the naturalist paradigm for social sciences. According to it the methods of the natural sciences are applicable in economics as well (Schaffer, 1996: 29). Human well-being can thus be described on basis of externally defined characteristics. Those can be separated from each other and are to be identified in an objective reality. According to this ‘naturalistic’ background this analysis is also a value-free one. A researcher is not considered to be a political actor, who is engaged with the reality she describes. Her description is external and objective. This means that the definitions of poverty can be and are chosen externally. The team that carries out the research itself chooses the indicators of poverty, without consultation with the population that is under focus. This is the reason why it is also called an ‘objective’ approach (Hanmer, 1999: 797). No subjective definitions of poverty are allowed. The major point of focus usually includes physical needs deprivation or low private consumption (an insufficient income to buy what one needs). There are four main methods indicating who might be considered as poor, within this approach. They are:
- Food energy method. It determines the lowest level of income or consumption expenditure at which minimum food energy required to satisfy energy needs is typically met. Those who do not consume sufficient food to meet those basic energy needs are the poor.
- Food-share method. It estimates costs of the food basket, which satisfies minimum food energy and divides it by the share of food expenditure of a poor household[1]. The poor are those who do not meet the basic consumption (not only of food) requirements.
- ‘Relative’ method. The poor are defined as those who live below a certain proportion (defined by the scientist) of mean income or expenditure.
- A hypothetical level of minimal consumption – for example 1 US dollar PPP.
International organisations like the World Bank often make use of the latter two methods to define the poor. The third relative measure has, for example, been used in half of some poverty assessments done by the World Bank in Africa in the 1990s (Hanmer et all. 1999: 800). The fourth method is especially useful when comparing poverty around the whole world. World Bank, for example, defines as poor those who consume less than 1 US dollar per person, per day, in 1985 US dollars[2]. According to this last measure, two hundred and fifty million of Africans, corresponding to 45 per cent of its population, are judged to be poor. It is also recognised that poverty, calculated on basis of this measure is highest in rural areas. Based on this statistic, forty-one per cent of the villagers of Kenya and ninety-four per cent of villagers of Ghana are said to be poor[3].
To separate the non-poor from the poor and to aggregate them, a poverty line (a borderline between the poor and the non-poor) is drawn. In the case of the income/consumption approach, it is expressed in monetary terms. It corresponds to the income or consumption expenditure level arrived at by one of the methods described above. The 1 $ PPP mentioned above, forms such a poverty line. Hanmer et al (1999: 800) underline the existence of an arbitrary element involved in setting of a poverty line in the case of all of the described methods. The poverty line based on the food energy method is, for example, arbitrary because it is impossible to pinpoint exactly the minimum level of nutrition. Different individuals need different calorie intakes, depending on their health, activities, work, climate etc. The food share method is criticised for the fact that the appropriate allowance for non-food consumption varies between individuals and locations. The non-food expenditure share in total expenditure, for example, is said to be much higher for the urban than for the rural poor. It is also interesting that countries with higher income per capita tend to use higher poverty lines, even if they use the so-called absolute standards (Hanmer et al 1999: 801). Relative poverty, set as a percentage of a mean income, is arbitrary per definition, just as the measure used by the World Bank, using 1 US$ a day as a poverty line. The setting of the poverty line is thus a decision of those carrying out the survey, and is often influenced by political considerations of those issuing the survey. The choice of a lower or higher poverty line can make the policies of a government appear extremely successful (the number of poor is lower than it used to be) or disastrous for the poor population (their number is much higher).
Those technical problems can sometimes be resolved. To give a more complicated and reliable view of poverty within a country, many poverty assessments frequently apply different poverty lines, as for example in the Maldives (de Kruijk, 1998). This resolves some problems, as it differentiates between the poor and the extremely poor. Nevertheless, as Hanmer et al (1999) and Warner et al (1999) stress, according to this measure, clearly defined, social sub-groups, except for the two mentioned above are not distinguished.
There are also several statistics to aggregate the information on poverty that are related to the poverty line. They are not only used with monetary indicators but are often applied to the social indicators indicating vulnerability and the level of functioning like mortality rate or level of education. I describe the most important ones, together with their major setbacks:
- Headcount - most common. This is the proportion of the total population below the poverty line. Based on this statistic, we call 45% of all the Africans poor. This is, however, not a perfect instrument to analyse poverty since it does not say anything about the depth of poverty. It does not provide any information about the distance of the poor to the poverty line. (Extremely poor are weighted in the same manner as those just below the poverty line). Therefore, it is also dangerous to use it as an indicator for policy successes. Often households just below the poverty line can profit from the government policies, while the situation of the really poor can become worse. On the other hand, what makes it successful is the fact that it is easily applied and comparable across the world.
- Poverty Gap Ratio – this measures the depth of poverty[4]. It is defined as the distance of the average poor to the poverty line as a proportion of the poverty line. It ranges from zero (nobody is poor) to one (the living standard indicator of all the poor is zero). This indicator ignores, however, the number of the poor. It is not always useful to use it for evaluation of policies since the crossing of the poverty line by the households or individuals can actually cause the ratio to rise and, hence, indicate a rise in poverty, while it has actually diminished. This indicator, however, is better than the headcount since the severity of poverty can be different across many nations or regions. In some, it is possible that people live just below the poverty line, while in others, they might be really far away from it, meaning that they are much more in need.
- Poverty Gap Index[5] – Poverty Gap Ratio normalised to the total population size rather than to the number of poor. It solves problems of the previous two measures. It, however, does not allow poorer households to count for more than the less poor.
- Forester, Greer and Thorbecke index – this index allows for a different approach to the severity of poverty. It is the Poverty Gap index to a chosen power a. If power aequals 0, the indicator gives the Headcount Ratio. When it equals one, it gives the Poverty Gap Index. A higher than one value of (a) attaches more value to the poorer households or individuals (those further away from the poverty line) and less to the ones close to the poverty line.
From the described characteristics of the income/consumption approach, it can be concluded that it measures well-being or poverty in a quantitative manner. Of all the possible indicators of poverty, this approach concentrates on consumption or income that can easily be described in monetary terms. During the designing of the survey, when confronted with the choice between income and consumption, the designers of poverty surveys usually choose the latter. The reasons for that choice are twofold. First, the data on consumption can be more easily obtained during a household survey that is usually of a quantitative nature. Secondly, income tends to vary throughout times, much more than consumption. Hence, the choice for consumption makes the surveys less dependent on the time of the year and therefore more reliable. On the other hand, a heavier reliance on consumption can lead to a more inadequate picture than reliance on income, as said in the introduction of the chapter. Income can say more than consumption about somebody’s position in a society, as consumption is more of an outcome of poverty than income.
Shaffer (1996: 24) states that the income/consumption approach is considered as objective, because it is designed to respect the actual consumption preferences or the consumption behaviour of the consumers[6]. Consumers are also assumed to allocate resources rationally and in such a way as to maximise basic needs fulfilment. The principle of representation of consumer preferences is violated only on rare occasions according to Shaffer (1996: 24). It happens during:
- The selection of goods to ‘count’ as sources of well-being - most often the food-share method, where the food basket representing a hypothetical minimum cost diet, does not correspond to the consumption habits of the poor,
- The acceptance or rejection of the intra-household distribution of the goods to ‘count’ - during the construction of household equivalence scales, the designers of the surveys depart from the actual intra-household distribution of goods, when they feel that the intra-household distribution reflects discrimination etc. and not utility-maximising behaviour,
- The acceptance or rejection of consumption expenditure levels based on food-energy or food–share methods when deriving the poverty line – the poverty line may be adjusted upwards or downwards when it is felt that the households are not ‘rational[7]’ in their choice of food (in the food energy method) or in their food/non-food share in total consumption expenditure (food share method).
Poverty research can be differentiated according to the sources of the data. In the case of the income/consumption approach, the sources of the data are questionnaires. These are most often the household surveys. The data from those surveys are most often combined with data on local prices of relevant goods and services. These are necessary to adjust the prices of food to the general level of comparison. However, the household surveys face several problems, especially in Africa. Let me discuss some of them:
- It is difficult to state what a household exactly is in the presence of polygamy or substantial migrant labour, as it is often the case in African countries. In Northern Ghana, in the society of Dagomba, a husband has several wives, usually two; each wife has responsibility only for her children, and does not have to share resources and income she independently earns with other wives and their children[8]. It will always remain the choice of the household survey designers as how to define a household.
- Household is a part of broader set of relations within a larger context, for example a whole village. It means that the resources available to a household are not easy to define. They are also extremely difficult to examine, and only more thorough studies of local social reality can show them. Short household surveys cannot do so. It is, hence, possible that a household has an enormous amount of wealth, but that it is not displayed. In the society of Dagomba, for example, it is usually difficult to determine who is the exact owner of cattle, since many do not want to display their wealth. It is also possible that a household can retrieve resources from other family members, and that it is extremely well endowed with such source of security resources that are not easy to see at first sight (Oppong, 1972: 19 and interviews of the author).
- Lack of examination of the intra-household inequalities, including the important gender dimensions of poverty, is a big problem when a survey relies on the household as a unit of analysis. There is substantial evidence, especially in Africa, that the economic differences within the household are enormous. Resources are, for example, not evenly distributed within a household. To confront those problems, some poverty surveys differentiate between males and females. However, this is not recognised as sufficient by some authors. Warner et al (1997), for example, propose the use of different social roles as a basis for an analysis of poverty. The household is then perceived as consisting of different individuals belonging to different social groups. The society of Dagomba of Northern Ghana can consist of the following social roles. They are displayed with the rights, responsibilities, and resources available to each social group within the compound.
Table 1 Proposed Matrix of economic roles
(Dagomba rural society)
|
|
Rights and
expectations of assistance |
Obligations and
responsibilities |
Resources at disposal |
|
Compound Head: (either
directly or through his nominee, the ‘Nachim Kpema’ |
Labour
of all compound members in farming for the compound; production decisions in
compound farming, disposal rights of compound produce; marketing decisions
and control of income from sale of compound produce; allocation of staples to
cooking wives, and; decisions relating to sale/ purchase of livestock and
other assets. |
Meet
food, schooling, medical and other consumption needs of compound members;
meet expenses associated with marriages, funerals and other social
obligations of compound members, and; other extra-compound obligations of
‘assistance’. |
Usufruct
access to land; labour of compound members; compound livestock/other assets,
and; stock of compound produce. |
|
Cooking Wives: |
Marketing
of comp produce and receipt of ‘commission’ on these sales; access to comp
food stocks for use in cooking; labour of junior women in cooking; days of
from cooking; possible financial and other ‘assistance’ from comp head or own
husband, and; disposal rights and control of income from sale of own
individual farm/non-farm produce. |
Oversee
food preparation for comp; supplement comp staples with ‘soup ingredients’;
assist in farming for comp; meet consumption needs of own nuclear family;
obligations to own kin and members of natal compound, and; other
extra-compound obligations of ‘assistance’. |
Land
(usufruct); own labour; own individually-owned livestock/assets, and; own
farm and non-farm produce. |
|
Newly married/
unmarried junior women: |
Possible
financial and other ‘assistance’ from comp head (and own husband if married),
and; (disposal rights and control of income from sale of own produce, if able
to find time and mobilise resources to engage in individual farm and non-farm
production activities). |
Cook
daily for comp; collect water and firewood for comp; assist in farming for
comp; (meet consumption needs of own nuclear family; obligations to own kin
and members of natal compound, and; other extra-compound obligations of
‘assistance’). |
(In
principle: Land (usufruct); own labour; own livestock/assets, and; own farm
and non-farm produce, if able to find time/ mobilise resources). |
|
Retired cooking wives: |
Full
control of own labour; possible financial and other ‘assistance’ from comp
head or own husband, and; full disposal rights and control of income from
sale of own individual farm/non-farm produce. |
(Possibly
supplement comp staples; obligations to own kin and members of natal
compound, and; other extra-compound obligations of ‘assistance’). |
Land
(usufruct); own labour; own individually-owned livestock/assets, and; own
farm and non-farm produce. |
|
Divorced women: |
Highly
varied. (At worst, longer-term divorced women may have a few rights and may
also be excluded from the web of reciprocal expectations of assistance). |
Highly
varied. (At worst, longer-term divorced women may face all the same
responsibilities of junior women). |
Highly
varied. (At worst may lose usufruct rights to land). |
|
Married dependant men: |
Partial
control of own labour; full disposal rights and control of income from sale
of own individual farm produce, and; (possible financial and other
‘assistance’ from comp head). |
Assist
in comp farming; supplement comp staples; meet consumption needs of own
nuclear family, and; other extra-compound obligations of ‘assistance’). |
Land
(usufruct); own labour; own individually-owned livestock/assets, and; own
produce. |
|
Unmarried dependant
men: |
Partial
control of own labour; expectation of financial ‘assistance’ from comp head
in meeting expenses associated with marrying, and; disposal rights and
control of income from sale of own individual produce. |
Do
most of the work for farming for the compound; supplement comp staples, (and;
other extra-compound obligations of ‘assistance’). |
Land
(usufruct); own labour; own individually-owned livestock/assets, and; own
produce. |
|
Children: (natural
and foster) |
Expectations
of financial and other assistance (for example in attending school). |
Collect
water/firewood and assist in comp farming/cooking (depending on sex). |
Own
labour (and sometimes poultry and other petty assets). |
Source: appendix to M. W. Warner, R.M. Al-Yhassan and J.G. Kydd (1997) ‘Beyond gender roles? Conceptualising the Social and Economic Lives of Rural Peoples in Sub-Saharan Africa’.
- Yet another problem is that the household surveys using the money metric approach need to consider price variations between the regions. The calculation of poverty line defined in terms of consumption requirements, for example, involves the conversion of goods or calories to money, and needs to make allowance for regional variations in prices. If it is not done properly, a different poverty line is being used for different regions. Often rural and urban areas are not correctly compared, since prices in those different areas are usually very different. It is highly possible that the high extent of poverty in rural Africa (Ghana – rural poor are 91 % of rural population, while only 40 % of the city population) is based on the wrong calculation of the prices. It should be noted that objectivity is difficult to reach in this case, as the way in which the adjustment is made is always dependent upon the designers of the survey.
- Household surveys also face the problem of the ‘economies of scale’. To enjoy the same living standards a family of eight has to spend more than the family of four, but less than twice as much. Many assessments, which use the per capita expenditure in a household as a measure of poverty, do not pay attention to that fact. This causes larger families to be considered poorer than smaller ones, although in reality, due to economies of scale, they might enjoy the same living standards.
- The sampling biases, including the under-representation of invisible villages or marginal groups (migrants, homeless), are yet another problem. Those people are often not members of any households and are not covered by interviews. The excluded societies and individuals, as described in chapter two, still form the majority of the poor in Africa. They hide in the bushes, or live in separate communities.
- Respondent or investigator bias; as it has been stated, much is dependent upon the designer of the survey, his subjective opinions can easily be translated into the survey.
-
Faulty
questionnaire design.
- Temporal/seasonal bias – the outcome is often dependent upon the season in which the survey is done. There are times, after harvest, when everybody is relatively rich in a village situation, and times, when only some suffer, for example, before harvest. People move in and out of poverty also in different years[9].
Objectives of the income/consumption approach are the last characteristic of this approach that differentiates it from the others. The main one is to provide an accurate description of a situation of poverty in a specific country or region. As it has already been described this is done in terms of an external concept, mostly income or consumption. Measurable and observable characteristics of a household or individual are being used, to describe it as poor. As stated in the previous chapter, information that cannot be used or influenced by the authorities issuing the survey is neglected. The same happens with information that cannot be quantified. Another major objective of the poverty surveys is to provide the government with the possible anti-poverty measures. However, according to for example Hanmer et al (1999: 806), the income/consumption surveys provide no link between poverty and its causes, since they merely offer a statistical description of the situation within a country. To be able to determine causes of poverty and on basis of that to provide possible measures to vindicate it, other kinds of research might be necessary, as this thesis is arguing. Communication with the poor, as provided by qualitative surveys, or the use of sciences such as history or anthropology, might be better for those goals.
4.3
Social indicators approach.
The income/consumption approach has been widely criticised (Baulch, 1996: 3). The concentration on income, inadequate food consumption was recognised as insufficient, since it does not meet the richness and complexity of human experience and human well-being. It has become apparent that it is a multidimensional phenomenon, consisting of material, mental, political, communal and other aspects and that various cultures define poverty in different ways (Maxwell, 1999: 2). Low consumption itself was recognised as either just one possible aspect of poverty or even as merely an outcome of it.
New models to describe poverty have emerged. They also concentrated on other indicators of poverty. They were:
Table
2 Other models of defining poverty, together with a number of possible
indicators.
|
New
models |
Possible
examples of indicators: |
|
The
basic needs |
- Level of health - described in life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, ratio of health facilities, hospital beds, public expenditure on health, etc. - Level of education - literacy rate or primary and secondary school enrolment or the percentage of school dropouts, or class size, etc. |
|
Vulnerability,
- the degree of exposure to risk. |
- Indicators of wealth, as assets one posses - those can vary in different locations, - Social networks one might rely on, - Access to credit – distance or accessibility of a bank, - Degree of dependency on market forces, - Crime – exposure to stealing, strength of police force, etc. - Environmental insecurity – months of drought, etc. - Political insecurity – democratic elections, military conflict in recent time, - Food insecurity – access to clean water, |
|
Capabilities
and functioning. |
- Life expectancy of a person, - Educational achievement - level of school education, - Level of all kinds of skills, - The degree of political or social power, - Other culturally defined indicators, |
|
Social
exclusion and well-being |
- The degree of social support, - Political voice, expressed in for example ability to vote, - Access to transportation and telecommunication network, |
Source: table
freely based on information provided by Maxwell (1999).
Many international organisations have recognised the need to use those models and have tried to combine them. The first of such measures was the Human Development Index, related to the Basic Needs Model, and was based on the ideas of Paul Streeten. Following this model, the UNDP has started to rank different countries according to their performance in the level of education (in majority of cases still western education), life expectancy at birth as well as National Income per capita below a certain maximum. According to its authors, this approach is less dependent upon the economic indicators only and gives a better overview of the human condition in all countries of the world (England, 1997: 392). Many later studies have used different components, mentioned in table 2. The UNDP’s studies of the Maldives (de Kruijk, 1998), for example, extensively concentrated on various indicators of living conditions, the degree of vulnerability as well as of social exclusion. This study has, thus, concentrated on the availability of clean water, access to transportation, to communication, to electricity, to health services, on the vulnerability to environmental insecurity, availability of food as well as on the access to paid labour. This specific study has produced a Human Vulnerability Index that made it possible to compare the living conditions of people living in various regions (island groups) of the Maldives.
Indexes such as HDI or HVI have thus broadened the perception of individual and social well-being by shifting away from income and concentrating on living conditions and the opportunities open to people. From the methodological point of view, not everything is different. Social indicators approach is connected to the naturalist paradigm for social sciences, rather than a hermeneutic one, that is interested in inter-subjective social meanings. Therefore, just like the income/consumption surveys, it determines the level of well-being in an external way and are overly quantitative in nature. Their main sources of data are the household surveys and they use statistics described above, as for example the poverty line[10]. They also share the same objectives, being a description of a poverty situation in a country or a region (one necessary for a comparison with other regions and countries) and a generation of policy prescriptions. Those similarities make this approach vulnerable to the same criticism faced by the income/consumption approach. It includes: reliance on the dubious results of household surveys and the reliance on the dubious results of a quantitative research instead of a qualitative one, the arbitrariness in the setting of poverty lines, exclusive focus on indicators to be influenced by the development practitioners and the governments, instead of on all possible indicators of poverty (Nustad, 2001), and arbitrary weighting of the different components of the indexes as the Human Development Index (England, 1997: 392)[11]. Just as in case of the income/consumption approach there are also intercultural problems, connected to the geo-politics behind the development project. Those problems are: consideration of comparison of the stage of development of different regions of the world as possible and constructive and, lack of the awareness of the fact that a researcher is a political actor, incapable of a value free analysis. This means that the values of North-Atlantic capitalist economies are emphasised while alternative (for example ecological) or locality specific values are being suppressed. This research enforces the hegemony of the North-Atlantic development project and does not allow for a ‘non-violent’ crossing of the cultural boundaries.
Nevertheless, this criticism does not make the social indicators approach irrelevant. Due to a broad perception of human well- and ill-being, it is clear that this view describes the situation of the poor much more fully and convincingly than income only. The attention is shifted towards the social aspects of human well-being. This allows the richness and variety of human existence and of the social and economic relations between human beings to be captured in a more convincing way than before. Politicians are also forced to pay attention to the various dimensions of human well-being that are being described in such a research (England, 1997: 391). It also needs to be underlined that, to the degree the local societies globalise, the chosen social indicators meet the locality specific nature of poverty. In a world that homogenises according to the North-Atlantic structures of a society and according to the corresponding values, the enriched indexes of human well-being cease to be foreign and inadequate. It appears that, given the current global developments, studies concentrating on the social indicators might still be the most useful tool for politicians and development practitioners to tackle poverty.
4.4 The participatory approach.
The existence of some of the problems connected to the hegemony of the North-Atlantic development project has been understood by a number of international organisations. To break the top-down (or external) approach in identifying the problems of the poor, Participatory Poverty Surveys have started to be designed and carried out. Those surveys have three major objectives. First is to achieve a critical understanding of peoples’ conceptions of ill-being. Second is to define their priorities in the complex societies in which they live. Third is to achieve the empowerment of the poor. According to the designers of such surveys (Shaffer, 1996: 26), empowerment may either be a result of the PPA exercise itself, as it is a critical reflection of the poor on their situation (the poor are supposed to learn something from the conversations) or it may actually be a result of the conclusions generated during the PPA. Explicit focus on the problems of the poor might initiate a national debate on poverty, and can lead to a change of preferences of the political elite of various countries (Baulch, 1996: 38).
The Participatory Poverty Assessments possess other distinct characteristics. They concentrate on extensive interaction with ‘local’ communities. During an extensive interaction between the facilitator of the survey and the participants, the constituents and sources of well or ill-being are to be revealed (Schaffer, 1996: 26). The facilitator plays a prominent role in the research. Preferences, values and conceptions of well- or ill-being of PPA participants are subject to her critical examination. She is also responsible for broadening the scope of the discussion, as to uncover the suppressed issues. In case the facilitator is properly prepared and has sufficient time to carry out the research, she can reveal information that is not available via means of a questionnaire. The tools facilitating the correct manner of interaction between the facilitator and ‘the poor’ include role playing, participatory public meetings, social mapping, participatory diagramming, contrast comparisons, livelihood analysis, etc. This is often similar to the anthropological field methodology. Nevertheless, the period of interaction is much shorter.
Data that are generated in a PPA exercise are both qualitative and quantitative. Unlike the case of income approach, consisting largely of cardinal measures, the quantitative data of the PPA consist largely of ordinal well-being measures. They are adequate for relative wealth rankings of different groups, but are often incomparable on the national scale. The scope of the conceptions of ill-being underlying the Participatory Poverty Approach is also much broader than in case of other approaches. The conversations with the poor people allow for inclusion of physical, social, economic, political, psychological or spiritual elements. Some of the characteristics of poverty, as identified by such researches, are mentioned in table 3 below. Those constituents of ill-being can also be reformulated to include not only a basic needs deprivation, but also absence of security, autonomy, self-respect and dignity. During the PPA process, the specific constituents of ill-being are also being precisely weighted. This allows for conclusions that are more specific in the later part of the assessments.
Table
3 Criteria
used by local people in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to describe the poor.
|
-
Disabled
(e.g. blind, crippled, mentally impaired, chronically sick) |
|
-
Widowed |
|
-
Lacking
land, livestock, farm equipment, grinding mill… |
|
-
Cannot decently bury their dead |
|
-
Cannot send their children to school |
|
-
Having more mouths to feed, fewer hands–to-help |
|
-
Lacking able-bodied members who can fend their families in
the event of crisis |
|
-
With bad housing |
|
-
Having vices (e.g. alcoholism) |
|
-
Being ‘poor in people’, lacking social supports |
|
-
Having to put children in employment |
|
-
Single parents |
|
-
Having to accept demeaning or low status work |
|
-
Having food security for only a few months each year |
|
-
Being dependent on common property resources |
Source: Chambers (1995)
‘Poverty and livelyhoods: whose reality counts? IDS Discussion Paper No
347 reprinted in Baulch (1996) Neglected Trade-offs in Poverty Measurement, IDS
Bulletin Vol. 27 No 1.
The sources of ill-being extend beyond the view of the income/consumption approach, which merely looks at the inadequate commodity consumption. According to Schaffer (1996), the categories, the indicators of the poor can include:
- Income and non-income sources of entitlements,
- Social relations of production, reproduction and exchange,
- Employment conditions, as well as
- Other sources of security, autonomy, self-respect and dignity, etc.
The definition and weighting of these elements result from the PPA process here as well.
The characteristics of the approach mentioned above also make it clear that the participatory poverty assessments have a different philosophical and methodological underpinning than the income/consumption and the social indicators approaches (Schaffer, 1996: 26). The latter ones try to apply the methods of natural sciences to economics. They state that human well-being can be described on the basis of externally defined characteristics of well-being that are possible to be objectively identified in reality. The participatory approach, on the other side, tries to apply the hermeneutic methodology to the social sciences, such as economics. It is interested in inter-subjective or subjective social meanings. Those cannot be arrived at by an external observation, but only via (well prepared) dialogue and interpretation. Contrary to the naturalistic methodology, the hermeneutic one considers a value-free social analysis as impossible. A researcher is a political actor. She is incapable of retrieving objective information about a social reality, as well as of an objective description of the problems. A choice of specific indicators is always coloured by the background of the researcher.
The differences between the income/consumption and participatory poverty approaches are again summarised in table 4.
Table
4 Analytical approaches to the study of poverty.
|
|
I Methodology |
II Conceptions of Ill-being |
|
|
c) Stance
towards Consumer d) Sources of
Data e) Objectives |
|
|
Income/ Consumption
Approach |
a) External:
Third party a priori determination b) Quantitative:
Income/ consumption expenditure levels c) Respectful:
Consumer is (usually) sovereign d) Questionnaire survey e) Description |
|
|
Participatory Approach |
a) Internal/External:
Interactive group determination b) Qualitative/Quantitative: Multiple criteria c) Critical:
Discursive examination of given preferences d) Participatory
Poverty Assessment e) Critical
Understanding/ Empowerment |
a) Multiple Deprivations b) Multiple Sources |
Source:
Shaffer ‘Beneath the Poverty Debate’ in IDS Bulletin vol. 27 No. 1 1996.
Criticism
of Participatory Poverty Assessments.
Despite its new and refreshing nature, the Participatory Poverty Assessments receive criticism from various points of view. First of all, both economists and politicians criticise Participatory Poverty Assessments for being insufficient, as they concentrate on local realities only. It is impossible to compare the results across different locations, especially at the national and international level (Hanmer, 1999: 803). Economists criticise the qualitative nature of the data, as it causes problems in aggregation. On the level of a project or a village, this critique is less correct, since the information from participatory research allows development practitioners a better understanding of the local situation as well as a better targeting of the poor. As far as both politicians and economists regard aggregation of the data on the national level as a necessity they will not be devoted to carrying out such researches.
Participatory Poverty Assessments secondly, are criticised for overestimating poverty. According to Baulch (1996: 39) this is because they fail to distinguish between poverty, relative deprivation and ill-being. This is a critique from a point of view that assumes the existence of a measurable objective poverty. It is not easy to distinguish between all three, and Baulch (1996) himself does not give any definition to do so.
Thirdly, just like the income/consumption approach, the participatory assessments fail to give a dynamic picture of poverty (Baulch, 1996: 40). The static picture that they give fails to distinguish between the transitory (conjunctural) poverty, and the structural (permanent) poverty. According to Baulch this is necessary if the assessments are to provide policy prescriptions. The distinction between permanent (structural) poverty and transitory (conjunctural) poverty in West Africa has been discussed in chapter two, and can be seen as an attempt, made in this thesis, to identify longer-term processes. On the other hand, it must be noted that the participatory poverty assessments are more likely to give a dynamic view of changes within the society. A proper methodology, including a longer period of participation or even monitoring of some of the households or individuals can resolve this problem (Baulch 1996: 41).
The criticism of the Participatory Poverty Research, from the point of view of social sciences such as anthropology, has been manifold as well, but stresses different points. The used methodology is considered inadequate. PPAs, using the scientific legitimacy of the anthropological field methodologies, are distinct from them. The anthropological participatory methodology requires a longer period of interaction between all of the participants. This is not the case with the PPAs. The assessments are done within a relatively short period of time (usually few days), while anthropological studies often take more than a year of participatory investigation (Geschiere, 1993: 67). Furthermore, they are based on too many presumptions and the degree of understanding of the social situation in a specific locality is influenced by random capabilities and knowledge of facilitators. Much of the specific information, necessary to describe poverty or vulnerability, such as the assets that one possesses, relations within the social networks or specific non-material definitions of well-being cannot be deciphered in an easy way. Even thorough studies of local reality, such as history or anthropology, are not well enough equipped to provide such knowledge. A few quick conversations of anthropological laymen certainly cannot achieve that. Further, according to Whitehead and Lockwood (1999: 542) despite the fact that much attention is being paid to the way in which the data are being collected, the importance of interpreting or ‘reading’ of them, the most important part of the field methodology of anthropology, is undervalued. According to Karen Brock (1999: 11) the methodology of the World Bank’s ‘Voices of the Poor’ (the document being a participatory research and a background of the WDR 2000/1), has a tendency to silent some of the voices of the poor. She maintains that even if the assessments indeed do pay attention to dividing people into separate social groups, as women, men and children in both villages and cities, the voices of, for example, those excluded from the society are not heard. They simply could not participate in the open group discussions. Finally, the third main objective of this approach, emphasising the possible empowerment of the poor, is questionable. Empowerment, via self-understanding, mentioned by Schaffer (1996), presupposes that the poor are not aware of the reasons for their poverty. It seems to say that a brief conversation with the educated outsiders, those carrying out the survey, can actually help them out of their situation. Empowerment due to a growing attention to the problems of the poor is unlikely as well. The present governance and power structures within various nations and at the global level do not change easily and a rising awareness of the existence of poverty among the wealthy is unlikely to change that situation (Whitehead and Lockwood, 1999: 550).
Methodological criticism of the Participatory Poverty Assessments raises doubts about the correctness of the representation of the local situation. It seems to be impossible to characterise PPAs as providing an interculturally valid knowledge but the assessments do signify a shift of focus of the economic research away from external measures of wealth towards the locality specific knowledge and needs of the poor. It has to be noted that if the participatory research is to have any influence on the global and local anti-poverty policies it still has to be combined with larger economic studies of poverty, that eventually provide policy prescriptions for governments. A few examples of such research are present in Africa. The next section discusses how the discussed measures coexist within the existing economic research of the World Bank.
4.5
Income/consumption and participatory combined.
Participatory
Poverty Assessments can be used in two ways. They can either generate bottom-up
knowledge for the development practitioners at the level of a locality (for
example a district in one of the regions of a country) - knowledge on which
they can base their specific policies and actions or, they can be incorporated
into the nation wide studies of poverty, where they can provide a change of
focus towards the actual needs of the poor. This section deals with the latter
issue.
For the past ten
years, international organisations and writers on poverty indeed have realised
that it is interesting and productive to combine both the income/consumption
and participatory approach into the poverty surveys (Baulch, 1996 and Shaffer,
1996). The examples of the combination of the Participatory Poverty Assessments
with the nation-wide studies of poverty are the assessment undertaken by the
World Bank in some of the African nations, in the 1990s. These were, for
example, Ghana II (1995), Uganda I, Tanzania and Zambia. The assessments are
treating three main themes and are usually divided into the following sections:
construction of a poverty profile of a country (who are the poor), the causes
of poverty (why they are poor) and a recommended poverty reduction strategy
(what to do about it). The poverty profile forms the major component of those
studies, and a Participatory Poverty Assessment is a usually minor part of it.
It must be noted that only half of the twenty-five World Bank Africa poverty
studies, undertaken in the 1990s, decided to use the participatory assessments,
while the other half looked at poverty exclusively in an external manner.
In line with the
criticism noted above, the nature of those particular Participatory Poverty
Assessments has been problematic. According to Whitehead and Lockwood (1999:
545), of the possible field methodologies, the World Bank has chosen the
cheapest and simplest ones. The participation based itself on simple conversations
or semi-structured interviews with the rural or city population of Africa. No
thorough, longer-term anthropological case studies have been carried out. As
noted by Geschiere (1993), such methodology cannot provide the researchers with
sufficient information about the rural but also town societies. There is
neither any certainty that the extremely poor were the ones with whom the
conversations have been carried out. Very striking is also the fact that the
assessments made no use of the already existing body of evidence build up by
social scientists. This would suppress the costs of the research while
broadening its scope, state Whitehead and Lockwood (1999: 550)[12].
Those authors also mention several problems of this research in the field of
gender. The potential of the Participatory Poverty Assessments in that field
has not been realised. The assessments are not entirely gender sensitive. Women
are not differentiated from men and the only way they appear in the study is as
heads of households. This is not sufficient, since in that manner much of the
intrahousehold inequality is not accounted for. The female- headed households
are also permanently described as poor. This does not need to be entirely
correct, as it is possible that women living alone are independent or even
quite wealthy compared to the rest of the population, state the authors.
Relations with other households and family are neither examined. According to
Whitehead and Lockwood (1999: 549), the setbacks are first of all caused by the
lack of a theoretical framework to analyse gender in those studies. They could
be improved if women were specifically looked at and distinguished as a
specific social category. ‘Voices of the poor’ need to become voices of either
poor women or men, they state. Warner et al (1997) underline this conclusion.
Nevertheless, they suggest that a focus on women only is not sufficient to
provide genuine information about various African societies. To analyse the
local situation correctly several different categories of women and men need to
be considered. Possible social roles for Dagomba society are described in Table
1 above.
According to both
Whitehead and Lockwood (1999) and Hanmer et al. (1999) the combination of the
participatory research with the rest of the studies has been just as
unsuccessful as the PPA themselves. Participatory assessments do not form an
integral part of the total assessments and in consequence do not fit with the
rest of them very well. Their findings only rarely find their way into other
parts of the documents. Especially striking is the lack of conclusions provided
by them in the policy sections[13].
Evidence, that underlines that people perceive poverty as much more than
current income or resources and that they do look for example at the long-term
security instead, quickly disappears. The writers of the assessments also
prefer the quantitative evidence of a household survey from the qualitative
data of participatory assessments. The latter do not translate the various
dimensions of poverty and the findings of participatory research into quality
of life indicators, as other studies do. This shows that even the social
indicators approach was not popular in the World Bank, during the time surveys
were carried out.
It can thus be
concluded that the income/consumption approach has characterised the World Bank
studies in general[14].
Therefore, it is vulnerable to the criticism of this approach. The assessments
over-emphasise income (or consumption-) poverty; they suffer from information
problems related to the household surveys and; they pay attention to different
social dimensions of poverty, as for example to education, health or nutrition,
in an insufficient way (Hanmer, 1999: 818). The possibility of retrieving more
information and of generating a knowledge that is closer to the actual needs of
the poor is therefore not realised. Contrary to the envisaged goal, the
influence of the voices of the poor on the gathered knowledge and on the
designed policies remains marginal.
There are three
major reasons for a failure in the combination of both approaches. First, there
is a lack of methodological sophistication of how to combine them. According to
Whitehead and Lockwood, ‘the authors of the assessments have limited
understanding of non-quantitative, non-survey based methodologies, poor
conceptualisation of what PPAs can do and very little idea about triangulation
and how multi-stranded methods can be successfully combined’ (Whitehead and
Lockwood 1999: 542). Secondly, according to Shaffer the difficulty in combination
of both approaches arises due to their different philosophical underpinnings.
The naturalist paradigm for social sciences is not easily combined with a
hermeneutic one, as the nature of the information gathered by both approaches
is too different to be able to combine them (Schaffer 1996: 32). Often
different groups of people become described as poor. In practice, due to an
assumed objectivity, the naturalistic paradigm is always more likely to be
applied. Those who conduct the research are not keen to emphasise that they
might be playing a political role in the process. This attitude is expressed by
the almost inevitable privileging of quantitative data from household surveys
over qualitative information from the participatory research.
The third point
underlines some of the considerations made in the previous chapter. The
translation of locality specific information into the language of another
society or into the language of science cannot happen without disruption or a
degree of ‘violence’ towards the locality herself, as Braathen (2001) or
Mudimbe (1987) underline. When knowledge about a locality is translated into
another language, it becomes subjected to its foreign rules and dynamics.
Influence on those dynamics is almost impossible. This is also the case with
information about poverty, which has been gathered in a participatory research.
Information that it provides has to be translated into the discourse of
economic poverty research. This discourse is often the expression of the current
ideology prevailing in the North-Atlantic[15].
In the present case, the disruption or the degree of violence towards the local
knowledge appears to be high. The World Bank is an important actor in the
global politics. It is endowed with power and resources to make a global
free-market economy a reality. All of the World Banks documents, including the
discussed poverty assessments, must be seen in the light of this project. They
cannot provide results that might challenge this goal. As far as the
participatory assessments did provide results that conflicted with this goal,
their outcomes had to be suppressed, state Whitehead and Lockwood (1999)[16].
Those outcomes had to fit the model of poverty and anti-poverty policies that
have been developed by the World Bank in the WDR 1990. In that document,
poverty is defined in monetary terms and global development in terms of a
growing GDP. Free trade and minimum state intervention into the economy are
regarded as the best anti-poverty measures. In line with the goals of the World
Bank, WDR 1990 presented global free-market economy as the best solution to the
social problems of the world. The outcomes of participatory assessments did not
fit well into such a framework. By defining poverty in terms other than income,
they undermined the hegemony of a rising GDP and of a free market as the best
anti-poverty strategy.
Authors critical
of World Bank’s orthodoxy, hence stress that WDR 1990 had a negative impact on
the assessments in general. The historical perspective, political context, and
international dimensions, such as debt and commodity price trends were ignored,
states Hanmer et al (1999: 819). Neither was there sufficient information about
poverty in the African context, since rural livelihoods, rural social and
gender relations and agrarian socio-economic processes were not examined
(Hanmer et al, 1999, Warner et al, 1997 and Whitehead et al, 1999). Therefore,
the socio-economic categories of the poor, a pre-requisite for a more correct
analysis of poverty, according to the cited authors, were not produced.
It needs to be
noted that WDR 2000/1 has tried to provide remedy to some of the problems
related to the inadequacy of WDR 1990. The free-market orthodoxy has been
partially challenged, the importance of state intervention in the struggle
against poverty has been substantially underlined and contrary to the WDR 1990,
‘Consultations with the Poor’ have played a more integral part of its
structure. Nevertheless, this report does not break with the universalistic
background of the WDR 1990. It remains to be a universal body of knowledge, all
future poverty assessments will have to relate to, and values of the
free-market, promoting well-being of only a certain part of the world’s
population, remain to play a key role also in this document.
There is one
question left unanswered. Why did the World Bank choose to use the
participatory approach in the first place, if their outcome could not have had
much influence on the rest of the discussed documents? Following the Foucaultian
perspective presented in the previous chapter, the most likely answer is that
the concentration on the ‘voices of the poor’ has been merely a search for
authority from the side of the World Bank. To legitimise its project, it tried
to use not only the authority of science but also of the ‘poor’ themselves.
They have appeared as active participants of development and as ones who have
influence on their own future. Unfortunately, in sad reality, they became part
of a project on which they had no influence. Their ‘voices’ have been used to
legitimise a universal (North-Atlantic) vision of poverty and anti-poverty
action that was developed thousands of miles away from their own homes. The
ones willing to listen to the voices of the poor have (willingly or unwillingly)
heard only their own voices. This is a pessimistic conclusion, from the
intercultural point of view. The goal of participation of the poor in the
poverty surveys was to come to a genuine understanding of local realities and
to design political actions appropriate to those realities. It has not been
reached.
4.6
Conclusion of the chapter and of the thesis.
The major goal of this chapter was to find an answer to the second question posed in beginning of this thesis. It was asked whether economic poverty studies can be improved so as to generate a more interculturally valid knowledge about poverty in Africa. As stated in the introduction of the thesis it would be a knowledge that is not disturbed by the effects of hegemonic subversion of one group of people by another, one, which is free from the effects of inequality caused by global economic and scientific power differences.
To be able to do so, methodologies of economic approaches designed to analyse poverty around the world were examined. They were: the income/consumption approach, the social indicators approach and the participatory approach. The first two approaches have been presented as having a North-Atlantic bias in the way they represent the reality of other places in the world. This is because they focus on consumption and on the characteristics of human well-being defined externally, usually by the designers of the surveys. The last, participatory approach, on the other hand, has been presented as one that carries the possibility of breaking the bias towards the North-Atlantic values that is overtly present in the economic research. It can meet some of the relativistic criticism of intercultural philosophy and of social sciences as such anthropology as its goal is to describe a locality specific situation and the local perceptions of well-being. Nevertheless, the chapter ended with a pessimistic conclusion. Goals of the participatory approach have not been met. The way it has been applied to poverty assessments in the cases of the World Bank studies of African countries has been inadequate. Methodology of those studies appeared to be far from sufficient and the incorporation of the outcomes of those studies into the body of knowledge of the World Bank appeared to be even more problematic. The outcomes of participatory assessments did have only a very selective and limited influence on the studies of which they were part. It was thus concluded that the participatory studies have merely legitimised the hegemonic political goals of the World Bank. This institution could pretend to have consulted the poor in creation of its model of poverty and of its globally applicable neo-liberal anti-poverty policies. As it has been underlined in chapter two and three (Chossudovsky, 1997, Sachs, 1993) those policies were more likely to empower the wealthy instead of the poor, on both national and global scale.
It can therefore be concluded that at the present time the potential of generating a genuine intercultural knowledge of poverty, in the area of development economics, is extremely limited. No knowledge specific to any reality can exist on its own. Even if participation is carried out in the best possible way, it needs to be translated into a language on which it has no influence. This means that outcomes of a participatory research will have to be subdued to the changing dynamics of the discourse of development economics. This science is certainly not a value-free one. It is directed to values that have emerged in the North-Atlantic and is vitally committed to spread them around the globe. Neither is this science free from the influences of the enormous global inequalities of power. The knowledge for example created within the World Bank, which has a well-defined global policy agenda, is especially vulnerable to this criticism. The danger that this global actor, is forced or destined to distort or even misuse the locality specific information, so as to legitimise their own goals, will remain to be high.
Yet the global political context is not a hopeless one. The international inequalities of power can be confronted. This confrontation, indeed still within the margins of the North-Atlantic discourse about development and poverty, can benefit the poor. Attempts to empower them and to make them active agents in the societies of which they are part, can be made. There are signs that in the North the empowerment of the poor is taken much more seriously than before. Struggle against poverty has become a major point of focus of the World Bank in recent years and as many writers underline (a/o. Skirbekk and St. Clair, 2001 and Braathen, 2001) WDR 2000/1 signifies a potential for a change. That the well-being of the poor, on both global and national scale, makes a chance of becoming more important in international policies, is also expressed in the policies of the European Union. Under the pressure of international and national opinions, for the first time in history, EU is attempting to change its agriculture policies that have enormously hurt farmers of developing countries. It is thus the North-Atlantic discourse about development and poverty as well as the actual actions of the North-Atlantic governments that can and will have major influence on the lives of the poor around the world. As far as the participatory research will be able to change those discourses, it will have an impact on the lives of the poor.
In line with the
outcomes of the previous chapters, it finally needs to be underlined that
despite criticism, there is space for the income/consumption and social
indicators approaches, next to the participatory approach. Both approaches,
even if with North-Atlantic bias, can still play an important role, not only
because it has the best developed methodology. As it was stated in the
introduction, while trying to answer the question, of whether the economic
studies of poverty are foreign in other than North-Atlantic parts of the World,
the social indicators but also the income/consumption approach are increasingly
correct in the description of the local societies. The relativistic view that
sees other societies as entirely different, and as indescribable by such a
research, is not entirely correct. Both forms of research are increasingly
adequate in the various regions of the world, therefore also in Africa. This is
because they do describe areas of human well-being that are increasingly
considered to be of vital importance by the majority of the world’s population.
The major reason behind this increasing adequacy of the North-Atlantic research
is the fact that Africa has gone through a process of globalisation and
economisation of its life in the recent hundred years of its history. Values
and characteristics of poverty that arose in the North-Atlantic became
increasingly shared among Africans, as described in chapter two. Nevertheless,
despite this development, there are still many features of African poverty that
are not captured by social indicators and income/consumption approaches. Those
both approaches cannot understand the poor within their specific social environments.
This is why they must be improved with more intensive, case-specific studies.
They can open the way to express values different from the North-Atlantic ones
and to expose the particularities of each case. There will always be a place
for research that understands the importance of such an extensive dialogue with
the other, local societies. Within the present situation anthropological and
historical studies of poverty might be the best tools to reach such a goal. As
far as such studies will be able to have influence on the development discourse
and as far as they are situated in a poor-friendly global or national setting,
they can generate a knowledge that can help to address the needs of the poor.
In the end an issue, that has not been thoroughly discussed in the thesis, needs to be elaborated on. It needs to be asked whether an intercultural knowledge is a realistic and a necessary goal still to be pursued in the contemporary world. Writers of for example Empire (2000) underline that this is not the right strategy for philosophy anymore. Global thinking should move beyond thinking in terms of identities, and a search for intercultural valid knowledge still remains to be connected to such kind of thinking. ‘Empire’ wants to go beyond it and announces the end of the existence of the ‘outside’, both in ideological as in geo-political sense. There are no traditional societies anymore (also in Africa) and it seems neither worthwhile to search for them, according to its authors. Everybody in the world is a part of the global economy. Resistance against the inequality should come from within. This, however, might not be the most productive way of looking at the global reality and of challenging the inequalities it produces. There are still large qualitative cultural and power differences between various societies or between various cultural orientations into which those societies can be systematically divided. Search for an intercultural knowledge, even if in the end impossible, is worthwhile pursuing. This thesis has represented such a search for otherness and has evaluated it positively. A complete undermining of the existence of cultural differences, and an entire deconstruction of human identity might hamper an attempt to analyse the global realities. A search for intercultural knowledge is not only a pre-condition for ‘our’ violence towards the others (those always constructed by ‘us’), as authors of ‘Empire’ would state, but also of our (indeed still very rare) care for them. This might be the major reason why we (if we happen to be those in power, or the wealthy ones) while looking at the global economic situation, will be always obliged to respect the secret of this otherness. ‘We’ should not stop to think of the prevailing material inequalities. Those inequalities will remain existent in the world, and they will probably always create our differing identities.
[1] Poor household is classified on basis of some previous definition (for example the lowest 20 per cent of the income distribution).
[2] This 1-dollar is in terms of the Purchasing Power Parity, meaning that it is adjusted for the price differences (of the basic food basket) between the different countries and is not reflecting the exchange rate only.
[3] Source World Bank (2001)
[4] The formula to describe it is
I = 1/q ∑ (z-yi)/z = 1 - µq/z where:
I – is the poverty gap ration
yi – is the living standard indicator of the household I
z – is the poverty line
µq - is the living standard indicator of the average poor
[6] It needs to be underlined that the focus of the survey designers on the consumption represents their choice only. This principally violates the idea of the objectivity of the survey.
[7] As in the case of decision upon discrimination or utility maximising behaviour the decision upon rationality is made by the survey designers.
[8] Information based on own interviews and Oppong (1972).
[9] The cited criticism of the surveys is based on Hanmer et al (1999), Whithead and Lockwood (1999) and own qualitative research in the society of Dagomba.
[10] Theoretically, it is possible to include locality specific characteristics of well-being in this approach. In African situation, vulnerability expressed in terms of lack of family support or lack of assets, one can rely on, as cattle can be included.
[11] The last critique was partially responded to in the study of poverty in the Maldives (de Kruijk, 1998), where people interviewed were to express the value they attach to the different components of the index. The several components of the index have been valued according to the preferences expressed by the population.
[12] In later research, as the recent ‘African Poverty at the Millennium’ (2001) World Bank indeed did consult John Iliffe (1987), discussing history of African poverty.
[13] Whitehead and Lockwood (1999) do mention few positive examples. In cases of Ghana II (1995), the perceptions of the poor were properly used as evidence in later parts of the research and information on vulnerability (appraisal of health and education) has been even used in the final policy sections. The assessments also provided information about the public services provision. Whitehead and Lockwood are sceptical whether a deliberate concentration on that issue really reflects the priorities of the poor.
[14] Expenditure below an arbitrary poverty line remained the main criterion of poverty. Half of the WB’s twenty-five assessments used the absolute poverty line; others used the relative poverty line. All assessments relied on the standard household surveys as their major source of information (Hanmer et al, 1999).
[15] The shifts between various development ideologies (those inspired by Keynes, the neo-liberal ideology, or the current Clinton-Blair, inclusive markets, orthodoxy, expressed in WDR 2000/1) are an expression of those changes.
[16] According to Whitehead and Lockwood (1999) influence upon the different country studies in practice was achieved by peer reviews of other members of the World Bank. Peers were situated in Washington.