How do the processes of adverse incorporation and social exclusion (AISE) underpin chronic poverty? This paper from the Chronic Poverty Research Centre examines the politics and economy of poverty’s causal processes over time. Challenging AISE involves a shift from policy to politics and from specific anti-poverty interventions to longer-term development strategies. Particular attention should be given to: industrialisation and labour market restructuring; moves towards developmental states; and supporting shifts from clientelism to citizenship.
The contemporary study of poverty has failed to address the underlying causal processes that produce and reproduce poverty over time. AISE research is able to reach across existing analytical boundaries and make links between dimensions and forms of social reality that would otherwise remain obscure. AISE relates especially to the nature and forms of capitalism, different stages and types of state formation and institutionalised patterns of social norms.
Social exclusion and adverse incorporation are often used in overlapping and competing ways. Nevertheless, both concepts have analytical value and can contribute to closer understanding of chronic poverty. The term adverse incorporation is thought to be more appropriate than social inclusion because it captures the ways in which localised livelihood strategies are enabled and constrained by economic, social and political relations over both time and space. These relations are driven by inequalities of power.
The analysis of social exclusion and adverse incorporation shows that citizenship and clientelism are not opposites. Citizenship can involve exclusionary dimensions and elements of clientelism can help the poorest people in the short-term. Further, clientelism and citizenship need to be understood in relation to wider political processes of political representation and competition, state formation and modes of government. Findings also include the following:
- Capitalism creates and perpetuates poverty in various ways including: private enclosure of common resources, small-scale household forms of production, crises that create new classes of poor people and environmental destruction.
- Social and cultural identity play important roles in social exclusion and adverse incorporation. Social exclusion based on identity is linked not simply to prejudice but to broader political and political economy processes.
- Spacial inequalities – between rural and urban areas and between geographically advantaged and disadvantaged regions – are increasing, partly as a consequence of the uneven impact of trade openness and globalisation.
- Migration can for some be a viable strategy for escaping poverty, but migrants who are unable to enter the formal economy are among the most impoverished. Spatial marginality and strategies of state formation produce poverty traps.
AISE and chronic poverty are deeply rooted, and any significant challenge to these inter-related processes will therefore require a political movement – and real social transformation. Despite this and other caveats, however, tentative policy suggestions would be to propose a closer focus on the following areas:
- Moves towards developmental states and nation-state building: The state remains the only institution that can protect people from the forces of either markets or ‘tradition’. Good governance initiatives could be re-thought as progressive interventions in long-term processes of state formation.
- Economic de- and re-regulation and the restructuring of labour and other markets.
- The promotion of citizenship in various forms, including anti-discrimination policies and universal programmes of social protection.
- More specific approaches to challenge particular forms of AISE (e.g. asset redistribution, fair trade, ‘affirmative action’ and economic empowerment).
