How does politics affect individual and collective exits from poverty? This chapter from a World Bank publication examines the politics of exclusion and the political production or reproduction of poverty. It focuses on causal links among four elements: social exclusion, poverty, exits from poverty and overall processes that generate inequality among social categories. Social exclusion lies at the heart of inequality-generating processes. Exclusion itself promotes poverty, and exits from poverty therefore depend on eliminating or bypassing the usual effects of social exclusion. Political programmes to address political interests are required.
Most of the world’s very poor people are likely to lack favourable categorical memberships and helpful connections. Therefore, their exits from poverty—if they happen at all—would result from either (a) their acquisition of new categorical memberships and connections or (b) political–economic changes that subvert the usual effects of categories and connections. Socially organised patterns of exclusion set formidable barriers to mobility in the way of most poor individuals and households.
Exclusion directly produces poverty if the crucial value-producing resources affect the livelihood of most or all people within a population. In an essentially agricultural region, for example, differences in access to land increase the likelihood that landless households will suffer absolute poverty. Similarly, to the extent that an economy attaches benefits exclusively to employment in capital-intensive firms, categories of the population that systematically lack access to employment suffer absolute poverty.
The political, economic and social impacts on organised exclusion from such benefits are significant. Although overall investments in economic growth may well produce collective exits from poverty, the social, economic and political organisation of exclusion makes it likely that very poor people will benefit least and last from broad interventions. Further findings are that:
- In the short- and medium-term, broad investment programmes that succeed will commonly increase inequality and therefore the relative deprivation of the very poor.
- In particular, membership in stigmatised categories and lack of facilitating interpersonal connections regularly combine to exclude very poor people from mobility opportunities.
- Existing political arrangements usually reinforce these forms of exclusion.
Both systems of inequality and the political arrangements that support them need to be transformed. Any wide-ranging and effective intervention to reduce inequality and poverty will require a political programme to attack, subvert, bypass or buy off existing political interests.
- Individual exits from poverty can occur by helping poor people to cross previously exclusionary boundaries, especially boundaries separating poor people from those who control resources and benefit from them through exploitation and opportunity hoarding.
- With greater difficulty but with larger consequences for existing political arrangements, collective exits from poverty can also occur through facilitated movement of whole categories across boundaries from exclusion to inclusion.
- New systems of production, in which previously poor people acquire collective control over newly productive resources, are likely to benefit whole categories of poor people more directly and rapidly than facilitated crossing of existing boundaries.
