This paper argues that social exclusion should be clearly differentiated from poverty. It proposes a reconceptualisation of social exclusion, not as a static state, but as ‘structural, institutional or agentive processes of repulsion or obstruction’. This definition encompasses processes occurring vertically throughout social hierarchies, not just in their lower strata. It enables social exclusion to inform analyses of stratification, segregation and subordination, especially within contexts of high or rising inequality. Three strengths of this redefinition of social exclusion are that it can be applied to situations: 1) where exclusions lead to stratifying or impoverishing trajectories without any short-term poverty outcomes; 2) where the upward mobility of poor people is hindered by exclusions occurring among the non-poor; and 3) to situations of inequality-induced conflict.
A fundamental criticism of the concept of social exclusion is that it is synonymous with poverty. This criticism of redundancy is valid in relation to standard ways of defining and operationalising social exclusion: these are already implicit within multidimensional approaches to studying poverty. However, in some situations exclusions do not overlap with poverty, or exclusions worsen with movements out of poverty. Conceptualisations of poverty are only capable of reflecting exclusions operating at the bottom of a social hierarchy, such as distance from and inability to access social or economic norms. A social exclusion lens can nonetheless potentially provide additional analytical insight, although only if it is clearly differentiated from poverty.
A working definition of social exclusion is proposed as involving three types of processes of ‘obstruction’ (of access, entry or upward mobility) or ‘repulsion’ (from positions of access and/or benefits):
- Structural processes: Structures that repel or obstruct people or groups from certain sections of a society or economy, whether intentional or not
- Institutional processes: ‘Institutional’ refers to the formal and informal systems, rules and norms governing the social order, such as those that obstruct or expel people from social service provisioning, or public employment
- Agentive processes: These refer to intentional forms of exclusion practised by one actor against another, such as identity-based discrimination.
This definition is not grounded with reference to norms, and is no longer dependent on poverty. The definition purposely avoids referring to context (i.e. exclusion from what?) in order to preserve the conceptualisation of social exclusion as an analytical device describing processes, applicable to any number of contexts. It holds that certain processes affecting a person’s condition are exclusionary, in combination with others that might be inclusionary or neutral.
Thus, exclusion can overlap with or lead to poverty, but it is not poverty. Exclusionary processes can be identified vertically throughout a social hierarchy, whereas poverty outcomes occur horizontally at the bottom end of a social hierarchy. This new approach could be used by practitioners to help address challenges in three situations:
- Where exclusions lead to stratifying and potentially impoverishing trajectories without any obvious short-term poverty outcomes. For example, in contexts of unequal growth, the greatest insecurity in terms of loss of relative position is usually faced by the middle classes.
- Where exclusions among non-poor social strata help to clarify obstacles faced by poor people attempting to enter these strata. This is particularly important when poverty reduction strategies are predicated on upward mobility, such as education. It is assumed, for example, that those receiving education will move into better jobs, but exclusionary pressures may prevent them from doing so.
- Where inequality induces conflict: Refocusing attention to include exclusionary processes occurring at the middle and upper ends of a social hierarchy is vital to understanding the inequality-induced social dynamics that might also contribute to conflict. This offers an important corrective to the common implicit tendency to blame inequality-induced conflict on the poor.
