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POVERTY: A STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE

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POVERTY: A STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE

By

Yousuf Daas - KU Leuven

Aug - 2018

POVERTY: A STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The debate on poverty and the means to eradicate it have seen years of theorizing.
There are several approaches to understand this phenomenon. These approaches can be
individualistic or structural in nature. Poverty is not just an economic concept but is also
political. There are various dynamics to its persistence and there are many state as well as
non-state actors involved. Are only individuals responsible for their impoverished lives?
Or is it structural problem that is leading to those impoverishments? Why is it that the more
developed a nation is, the more is the inequality there? All these queries can be addressed
to an extent through primary literature attempts to understand the discourses on poverty.

Keywords: Poverty, Structural, Poor, Development

Introduction:

The question of poverty is a multidimensional discourse. There have been many

viewpoints regarding its emergence and its continuity through the ages. How can one
understand poverty or the poor without understanding the evolution of humankind? The
British theorist Darwin in his work ‘Origin of Species’ (1859) argues that the evolution of
all the species should be seen as the struggle for survival over million years. His idea of
survival of the fittest was a counter to the hegemonic notion of hierarchy as the foundation
of human society. Darwin was not promoting individualism as is argued by many scholars.
The social theory of Darwinism is fundamentally based on harmony amongst the
individuals. The survival was not about a competition to fight out each other, but it was
about working together collectively for the well being of every individual. At the same
time, we have theorists like Thomas Malthus who believed that social misery, famine, and
war are essential to the society to avert “an unfeasible demographic explosion” (Breman,
2004, p.3870).

The Malthusian view goes hand in hand with the contemporary neoclassical
policies where there may be a focus on combating poverty but what lies beneath is an
incredibly flawed idea that the poor masses are themselves responsible to blame for their
miseries (Breman, 2004). While referring to poverty from a structural perspective, there is
a need to address the political values on which our institutions are based. The economically
well-off people find the manifestations of poverty unbearable, rather than poverty itself.
For example, the slums in and around urban spaces are seen as antagonistic to the aesthetics
of the ruling class. Hence the idea of eradication of poverty transforms itself into
invisibility of poor to establish their lost aesthetics.

The image of poverty should not be conceived as just a lack of access to essential
resources but also as the failing of the human dignity. By the 1970’s, the argument that
poverty is about insufficient or inadequate economic activity became redundant. The
reason was various case studies emerging from informal sectors across the third world
countries. These cases demonstrated that it was not the lack of hard work that is responsible
for creating deprived masses as the informal sectors were full of ‘laboring poor’ (Breman,
2001).

For over a half a century, poverty has been a significant factor in slow international
growth and development. The interpretation of this issue and the solutions proposed during
this period have shifted along with policy transformations, changes in the social sciences,
and in political relationships (Randall & Coast, 2015). The idea of development and
poverty are contradictory to each other. One cannot argue that there is development as well
as an increase in poverty at the same time. What should actually run parallel to increasing
development is equality among the people. Both these phenomena should not be treated as
the ‘other’ of each other. Current strategy advocates for promoting inclusion of political
alliances, recognizing that there is the necessity for national ownership to minimize poverty
and the poor being allowed to participate in policy dialogues. To understand the concept
of poverty, a focus on human behavior concerning people’s social environment is critical
(Director, 2006). The study of cultural ideas and their applications in cross-cultural
comparisons is vital as well. The evolutionary approaches to the theories of culture and
human diversity have produced different conceptualizations of indigence representation in
contemporary studies (Director, 2006).
Poverty can be perceived in different ways:

Poverty as individualistic concept

From this point of view, people are in indigence because, allegedly, they are
ignorant, uneducated, lazy or inferior in some way (Bridges, 2016). Individuals who do not
work hard through education and investments end up leading their lives in indigence.
Nonetheless, this hypothesis postulates that the destiny of life is dependent on the
background of a person. This theory implies that people who are born and brought up in
needy families become poor. If this perception were accurate, then eradication of poverty
would be realistic in a sense that it the needy families could be supported to come out of
poverty.

Poverty as structural concept

This hypothesis postulates that people who are poor find themselves in situations
in the economic structure characterized by insufficient income. While referring to structure,
I mean the political, social and economic structures which have specific values and
ideologies. These set of values and ideologies can be liberal, neoliberal, capitalist or
socialist. Most of the individuals in these structures do not stay in the hovels forever
because human lives are dynamic (Mosse, 2010). At one point they are in a low-income
state, but at a later instance, they may experience some upward social mobility after
obtaining employment or benefitting from some form of promotion (Jordan, 2004). The
developing country does not disappear from the lives of some of these people because they
still find themselves back in the situations as a result of persistence defect in the economic
system; known as “poverty traps”. Therefore, the most efficient way to abolish poverty is
to alter the structure of the economy to manage the number of low-income hovels.

When trying to understand poverty based on the perceptions above, a vital question
is: are the poor people the same every year? Allegedly, low-income individuals are not the
same and change annually. This cyclical and constant feed further supports the structural
nature of poverty (Jordan, 2004). As mentioned above, this defect in the economic system
is called a poverty trap. According to Izhar, a poverty trap is “any self-reinforcing
mechanism, which causes poverty to persist” (2005, P.2). The mixed reports of the
Millennium Project task forces differentiate between various forms of poverty; together
with income poverty, service economic condition and absolute poverty, as incontestable
by very low human development outcomes (Hamilton et al., 2014).

Following this, I would argue that poverty is structural by nature. The idea of either
absolute or relative poverty is structurally driven although the former category is what
needed to be addressed at a priority basis since the relative poverty is something that cannot
be dealt with instantly. For example, a middle class working professional is poor when
compared to an industrialist but is not as poor when compared to a daily wage worker.
When we look into absolute poverty, we find it to be biological as there is a threat to the
person’s existence (Foster, 1998). In both cases, the structure is the primary cause of
deprivation. Poverty being structural leads us to try to manage poverty as an international
concern.

In managing poverty as an international concern, The World Bank is the primary

agent as its mandate is to establish systematic ways of hypothesizing, analyzing and
representing poverty (Small, 2015). The World Bank’s role is universally vital in
publicizing the annual World Development Report. Requisites to the current development
approaches encompass promoting academic researches on poverty and introduction of
poverty reduction strategies (PRS) that gradually form the basis of the cooperation between
the developing countries’ governments and donor agencies (Klugman et. al, 2017).

In the second half of the 20th century, there was a sense of generosity through the
idea of ‘development aid’ for the global south by the global north. However, the World
Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund can only gain
success in their mission of managing poverty if all the target groups are taken into
confidence. To emphasize the structural hindrances in the upliftment of the poor, Rajiv
Gandhi, the late Prime Minister of India proclaimed how the amount of aid released by the
government keeps on reducing at every stage and when it reaches the poor it is barely one-
tenth of the amount initially released (Press, 2017). By this, what he tried to reflect upon
was the structural problems that need to be addressed.
Conclusion:

As a conclusion, poverty should be perceived as something structural by nature,

individuals are somehow victims since the constitution of poverty, its characteristics, and
causes are not mostly individualistic. Even looking at poverty as something “cultural” is
not accepted. Oscar Lewis, a famous anthropologist, in his book “the culture of poverty”
referred to poverty as something cultural, and according to that, I would argue, if poverty
was something cultural then there is nothing we can do about it. Same applies if we will
assume that poverty is mostly individual by nature. To help eradicating poverty; It should
be looked at from the structural perspective.
References:

Breman, J. (2001). A Question of Poverty, Valedictory Address as Professor of

Development Sociology [Transcript]. Retrieved from
https://www.iss.nl/sites/corporate/files/Breman_Valedictory.pdf

Breman, J. (2004). Return of Social Inequality: A Fashionable Doctrine. Economic and

Political Weekly, 39(35), 3869-3872. Retrieved July 29, 2018.
https://www.epw.in/journal/2004/35/commentary/return-social-
inequality.html?0=ip_login_no_cache%3D0f89c56f76f56ce8cc777ecd83fe7471

Bridges, K. M. (2016). The Deserving Poor, the Undeserving Poor, and Class-Based
Affirmative Action. Emory LJ, 66, 1049.

Darwin, C. (1859). On the origins of species by means of natural selection. London:

Murray, 247, 1859.

Director, B. S. (2006). Understanding Poverty From Multiple Social Science Perspectives.

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Dürr, E. (2012). Urban poverty, spatial representation and mobility: touring a slum in
Mexico. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36(4), pp. 706-724.

Foster, J.E. (1998). Absolute versus Relative Poverty. The American Economic Review,
88(2), pp. 335-341.

Hamilton, K., Piacentini, M. G., Banister, E., Barrios, A., Blocker, C. P., Coleman, C. A.,
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Izhar, H. (2005). Why poverty traps emerge. Class II.

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Klugman, J., Selowsky, M., Zhou, J., & Abrams, A. (2017). THE IMF AND SOCIAL
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