Bringing Politics Back In To Poverty Analysis: Why Understanding of Social Relations Matters More for Policy on Chronic Poverty than Measurement* John Harriss Simon Fraser University Burnaby, Canada Email: jharriss@sfu.ca Click here to download working paper

Abstract
Mainstream poverty research, even after experts had generally accepted the need for a multi-dimensional view of poverty, going beyond income/consumption measures to take account of holdings of assets and hence of longer run security, and of the factor of self-respect (see Chambers 1988, 1992), has generally failed to address the dynamic, structural and relational factors that give rise to poverty. Little, if any, of this research aims to address the questions of how and why it is that the factors that are considered are distributed in the way they are through a society. These are questions of the political economy of contemporary capitalism, and of cultural politics. That they are largely ignored shows that poverty research plays a part in depoliticising what are in essence political problems. It is a part of what James Ferguson (1990) memorably described as the ‘anti-politics machine’. Poverty research in international development shares in ‘the idea that scientific knowledge holds the key to solving social problems’, which, as Alice O’Connor says, ‘has long been an article of faith in American liberalism’ (2001: 3). If only – the implicit reasoning runs – ‘we’ can build a good scientific understanding of poverty then ‘we’ will be able to solve the problem. But the reality is that poverty knowledge is profoundly political, as is shown up so clearly in contemporary debates over poverty trends in India in the 1990s (see Deaton and Kozel 2004). The problem is that long chains of assumptions are necessarily made even in the most sophisticated measurements of poverty so that they are always open to question; and which assumptions different specialists are most ready to accept depends on value judgements. There is also an important sense in which, as O’Connor argues, poverty research, dominated as it is – in the case of international development - by people educated in a small number of mainly American universities, is an exercise in power. Poverty research seems to show that the social sciences should, as Flyvberg has argued (2001) cease to try to emulate the natural sciences. They are more effective in generating the kind of knowledge that grows out of familiarity with practice in particular contexts, helping people to question relationships of knowledge and power - such as those giving rise to poverty - and thereby to work to produce change. Such a view has quite profound implications for the design of poverty research.

* This paper was commissioned by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre and was first presented at the CPRC 'Workshop on Concepts and Methods for Analysing Poverty Dynamics and Chronic Poverty', held at the University of Manchester, 23 to 25 October 2006.