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Chronic Poverty and Social Protection

Author: A Barrientos and A Shepherd
Date: 2003
Size: 20 pages (72 KB)

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Summary

What is social protection and to what extent does it address chronic poverty? The predominant perspective on social protection focuses on preventing risk, reducing vulnerability and ameliorating the impact of risk realisations. This paper, prepared for the Chronic Poverty Research Centre Conference, focuses on the extent to which social protection thus defined can help reduce chronic poverty. It concludes that new perspectives on social protection can have a role in interrupting risk and vulnerability among the chronic poor.

Technically defined, chronic poverty means those who are persistently poor over a few years. The current approach to social protection was designed predominantly to tackle vulnerability. The challenge is whether it can play a role in creating conditions for the persistently poor to emerge from poverty.

Social protection is defined as public actions taken in response to levels of vulnerability, risk and deprivation deemed socially unacceptable within a society. The current approach has several important strands: It focuses on poverty reduction and providing support to the poorest, and seeks to address the causes of poverty rather than its symptoms. It is forward-looking, underlining the need to reduce risk and vulnerability, and acknowledges the heterogeneity of risks affecting the poor. It also addresses the impact of globalisation on the demand and supply of social protection; the importance of the gender dimension of distribution of risk; and issues of governance and participation in the provision of social protection.

Social protection raises questions about the relationship between risk and vulnerability and chronic poverty. To the extent that causal factors of chronic poverty extend beyond risk and vulnerability, social protection provides only a partial understanding of chronic poverty.

• Much poverty can be explained in terms of risk, and behavioural responses to such risk, such as adopting safer but lower return production techniques.
• However, this is a partial understanding that neglects structural factors underlying chronic poverty, such as discrimination against certain groups, the exclusion of remote areas from political participation, and so on.
• Idiosyncratic factors also contribute to chronic poverty. Understandings of chronic poverty need to balance structural and idiosyncratic factors with agency.
• Most operational measures of chronic poverty fail to account for risk and vulnerability. Adopting a social protection framework requires taking account of risk and vulnerability as factors in chronic poverty.

At the policy level, the key issue is the extent to which the social protection framework implies a focus on transient poverty as the main objective of interventions.

• To the extent that factors determining chronic poverty are different from those causing transient poverty, policy bifurcation is likely. Chronic poverty is likely to give ground to transient poverty as it requires higher cost, longer-term interventions and is less widespread.
• However, such a bifurcation is not warranted, as the distinction between chronic and transient poverty is not clear-cut in terms of their determinants and population groups.
• Social protection addresses chronic and transient poverty, but the issue is whether it involves a bias towards transient poverty. The focus on risk involves a bias against sustained asset transfers; the scope of integrated programmes and the prioritisation of components are not sufficiently worked out; and political economy issues associated with the support and adoption of social protection need to be investigated.
• Chronically poor people do need and can benefit from social protection. Research is needed on the extent to which behavioural responses are a direct response to risk calculations, or are more a response to the architecture of poverty, and conditioned by social norms.

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Source: Barrientos, A and Shepherd, A., 2003, ‘Chronic Poverty and Social Protection’, paper presented at the Chronic Poverty Research Centre Conference on Chronic Poverty, University of Manchester, April 2003
Author: Chronic Poverty Research Centre, http://www.chronicpoverty.org/