What are the causes of chronic poverty and through what social mechanisms does it persist? How does a weak group become a constituency and a political agenda? This paper from the Chronic Poverty Research Centre draws on case studies from western India. Research on poverty has to be reconnected to knowledge about the way in which socio-economic, political and cultural systems work. Chronic poverty develops in the midst of capitalist growth and is perpetuated by ordinary relations of exploitation and opportunity hoarding. To address it, multi-level and long-term strategies are needed.
Chronic poverty can be seen as an outcome of the historical and contemporary dynamics of capitalism, with its relations of accumulation, dispossession, differentiation and exploitation. The case of poor tribal people in western India highlights the relations of dispossession and primitive accumulation associated with colonial capitalism but extended into post-colonial times.
Resource extraction is one of the poverty-generating aspects of capitalism. The alliances and class interests involved in it have a bearing on the constrained livelihoods of poor forest-dependent tribal cultivators. Engagement with markets arises from and reproduces unequal power relations. Furthermore, strategies of accumulation and pauperisation are interlinked.
Nevertheless, the processes of impoverishment are never narrowly economic. Inequality is perpetuated and stabilised by social mechanisms such as categorical inequality and adaptation.
- Changing the agenda and making constituencies out of vulnerable groups requires the politicisation of their concerns. However, in mainstream politics, the terms of political inclusion of subordinated groups are set by others.
- People seek political support while protecting themselves from the potential dangers of ethnicised or communalised identities that risk undermining their practical interests.
- Systems of unequal power naturalise injustice, and the experience of poverty goes along with subjection to judgements that impinge upon poor people’s self-evaluation and self-worth.
- Confrontational approaches may present intolerable risks to vulnerable people whose chronic insecurity aligns them (and their perceived interests) to the interests of their exploiters.
- Only the state can protect people from the forces of the market or tradition, although the democratic political process does not automatically guarantee commitment to the needs of the chronically poor.
Chronic poverty is the product of historically rooted multi-level relations of appropriation and exploitation. The strategies to address this poverty and change power relations are correspondingly multi-level and long-term:
- Strategies range from public campaigns, lobbying, advocacy and bureaucratic and donor influence, which highlight exploitation of tribal migrant labourers and could lead to new protective legislation, grievance mechanisms and government programmes.
- Opening spaces for empowerment is a challenge but awareness-raising, legal rights education and worker registration are ‘invited spaces’ engaging with local power that may evolve into more direct claims.
- Vertical links and coalitions involving activists, NGO networks, or international donors aim to open up closed spaces or design new ‘invited spaces’.
- Skills training as well as new accountability mechanisms, or associations of poor people are important. They can support people’s own struggles for justice, dignity and access to productive resources.
- Coalitions and alliances involving the powerful are necessary to bring the interests of vulnerable groups onto the political agenda, which is a precondition for pro-poor change.
- Changes are not wrought through direct struggle and mobilisation; they are worked by revealing and challenging the hidden two-dimensional power that organises the interests of the poor out of politics.
