The Dictionary of Human Geography (155 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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poverty
A much contested term that sug gests a state of welfare/illfare in which a person cannot function in one or more respects as a capable human being. Poverty is not a term that is easily defined. In so called ?poor? or ?developing? countries, attempts are often made to define poverty in ?absolute? or nutri tional terms. The official definitions and measurements of poverty used in India high light some of the complexities and challenges associated with this category. The Government of India tracks the number of people in the country who cannot purchase enough commodities to ensure that they get on average 2,400 calories per day in rural areas or 2,100 calories per day in urban areas. These are aggregate figures that are collected at the househoLd level by the census authorities or by officers of the National Sample Survey. Attempts are also made to count the number of women or chiLdren in absolute poverty, or people in female headed households or those over 60. The Indian government maintains that the head count ratio of people living below the poverty line has halved since 1973 4, coming down from about 55 per cent of the population to about 26 per cent of the population in 1999 2000. This still amounted to more than 260 million people. Independent scholars have challenged the India?s govern ment data and generally put the 2000 figure at 300 350 million people. (NEW PARAGRAPH) About one in five people who suffer from absolute poverty live in India, despite recent progress there. Rates of poverty are higher for females than for males. It has also been esti mated (Sen, 1990) that more than 100 million women are ?missing? in South asia and China as a result of gendered social practices before and after birth (female abortion and infanti cide, male preference in feeding and health care). Yet it is Sub Saharan africa that gener ally comes to mind when discussion in Northern countries turns to absolute poverty. It is here that Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist and adviser to Ban Ki Moon at the United Nations, has demanded action to secure ?the end of poverty in our lifetime?. Sachs (2005) has called for the elimination of what he calls ?extreme poverty? by 2025. He wants the US government to impose a 5 per cent income tax surcharge on Americans earn ing more than $200,000 per annum. This will generate over half of the $70 80 billion per year that he reckons is necessary to kick start economic growth in the poorest countries. The remaining funds must come from other richer countries. Such concerted spending, Sachs argues, can ensure that the first Millennium Development Goal is met the UN agreed target of halving between 1990 and 2015 the proportion of people whose income is less than one US dollar a day. It might also eliminate extreme poverty and hunger by 2025, particularly if increased aid spending is directed not only towards economic growth, but also to better educa tional provision and heaLthcare delivery, including for HIV/AIDS patients. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Not everyone agrees with Sachs? vision of what causes absolute poverty (he directs a lot of attention to physicaL geography) or his suggestion that it is best addressed by massive programmes of public spending (see also development). Part of the reason for this is that Sachs is mainly concerned with calorific or income poverty. Adam Smith famously argued that a definition of poverty should include the right not to feel shame in public. In other words, he recognized that people can not function in ways that they might want to if they are the targets of physical or verbal abuse. This tradition of thinking has been continued by John Maynard Keynes and Amartya Sen. One virtue of Sen?s (2000) work is that it directs us to think about poverty in relational (NEW PARAGRAPH) and not simply absolute terms. What mat ters, Sen suggests, is whether we have the capability to live our lives in ways that we consider meaningful, however differently we might define what a meaningful life is. This is partly qualified, for Sen, by the prior requirement that all human beings must have a minimal level of food intake, shelter, educa tion and health to function as humans. One can imagine a family in Punjab, then, that is above a state defined poverty line. Perhaps the family has benefited from rising incomes as a result of the green revoLution. But what if females in the family lose paid jobs to male kin, perhaps on the basis that their labour in the fields is no longer ?required?? What if this loss of earning power translates into a system of purdah, where women find it harder to ven ture into public space? For Sen, this can also be a sign of poverty, precisely because it defines a gendered system of sociaL excLu sion. The same argument can be extended to members of social groups who are not allowed to worship with others, or who cannot easily draw water from public wells (Erb and Harriss White, 2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH) This way of thinking about poverty also dir ects attention to social norms and thus to the geographical nature of poverty. In richer coun tries, ?poverty? is most commonly defined as relative deprivation, and here as elsewhere it tends to be feminized (Jones and Kodras, 1990; but see also Chant, 2006). People are considered to be poor relative to some assumed bundle of goods or services, or of capabilities and functionings, that provides for at least a minimum level of access to what is considered ?normal? in a given social setting. (NEW PARAGRAPH) For example, in the USA, not having a televi sion set might be considered an index both of social exclusion and of relative deprivation, at least where this is not an active family choice. Once the word ?normal? comes into play, how ever, we recognize that ?wars on poverty? are discursive constructions and not just political campaigns (Yapa, 1998: see discourse). Social scientists now pay close attention to the powers of state and non state actors to define ?poverty?. They also look at the govern mental effects of describing someone as poor or, as in India, as a Below Poverty Line (BPL) person or household (Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and Veron, 2005). Work on these issues is being published alongside academic research on poverty, inequality and gLobaL ization in the world economy (Wade, 2004; Wolf, 2004). There is clearly room for both types of work: for studies that are sharply attentive to the cultural constructions of pov erty and its effects in different locations, and for studies that carefully seek to map out what has been happening to absolute poverty in the developing world (with and without consider ations of India and China, whose enormous size affects all calculations) in an age of appar ently increased spatial interdependencies. sco (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gordon and Spicker (1999); Jones (2004a); Sachs (2005); World Bank (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
poverty gap
Poverty is conventionally measured in terms of an Absolute Poverty Line, expressed in monetary terms: it is the income or expenditure below which a min imum nutritionally adequate diet plus essen tial non food requirements are no longer affordable (e.g. spending per capita of less than US$1.00 a day, which is the conventional measure or threshold for the Absolute Poverty Line everywhere). A poverty line distin guishes, then, the poor from the non poor (Ravallion, 1995; UNDP, 1998). Poverty esti mates are typically based on data from actual househoLd budget or income/expenditure surveys. In this way, a proportion of a coun try?s population or an absolute number of per sons or households can be designated as living in absolute poverty: this is the Head Count Index. Currently, for example, it is estimated that 47 per cent of the population in Nigeria live in absolute poverty. Using this Absolute Poverty Line, it is possible to calculate what proportion of the GDP of a country would be required to lift those in absolute poverty above the poverty line (e.g. the proportion of (NEW PARAGRAPH) Nigeria?s GDP that would be required to lift the 70 millions who are absolutely poor to a condition in which their basic needs were ful filled). This is the poverty gap: the poorer the country and the larger the number of people in poverty, the greater is the gap (i.e. the resources that must be devoted to raise those in poverty). The poverty gap thus speaks to the scale and depth of poverty, and what it would take as a measure of national output to bring all of the population above the poverty line. The Poverty Gap Ratio refers to the mean distance below the $1 a day poverty line expressed as a percentage of the poverty line (currently 34 per cent for Nigeria). The Poverty Gap Index refers to additional money the average poor person would have to spend (in aggregate or as a proportion of total con sumption) in order to reach the poverty line. The poverty gap for India is currently 4 per cent, for China 1 per cent and for eastern Europe 0.1 per cent. The Poverty Severity Index measures the distribution of welfare of those below the poverty line (i.e. between the poor and the ultra poor). mw (NEW PARAGRAPH)
power
A minimal definition of power would refer to the ability of one agent to affect the actions or attitudes of another. Like most con cepts that are central to social science, the meanings, causes and effects of power are con tinually being re assessed. One thing we know for sure is that it is trite to think of power only in negative terms. The possibility of having a conversation with someone, of running a class or seminar in which people can learn, of play ing a football match, depends upon the deployment of power: of people taking turns to speak and listen, of students and teachers doing work as agreed, of players deferring to a referee. People both exercise power and are on the receiving end of power at different times every day, in all realms of life. More important than the fact that power is exercised is the way in which power is constructed and deployed. To what extent is power concentrated in cer tain institutions, relationships or agencies? How visible is it? What are the opportunities for power relations to be contested or rotated? Are accountability mechanisms in place, and if so how well do they work? (NEW PARAGRAPH) The idea that power is fundamentally nega tive continues to be a powerful one, even when it is coupled with an idea of necessary restraint. Thomas Hobbes (1968 [1651]) argued that all men (sic) acted as egoists, bent on the satisfaction of their desires through relentless power plays. Given a world of scarcity, only the sovereign could prevent these individualized acts of power from adding up to an intolerable state of nature (cf. sov ereign power). Contemporary work on internationaL reLations by so called Realists presents a similar view of power, in which all states seek to maximize their self interest and are prepared to use violence to this end. Anarchy is prevented only by the exercise of hegemony by a dominant power. Some versions of marxism come close to this argument. Marxists argue that capitalist states deploy their power to guarantee the accumuLation process under the rule of cap itaL. It is not surprising, then, that many Realists and Marxists share the view that the war in Iraq was fundamentally about oiL and the protection of America?s self interest. As David Harvey puts it in The new imperialism, joining Marx to Mackinder, ?Whoever controls the middLe east controls the global oil spigot and whoever controls the global oil spigot can control the global economy, at least for the near future? (2003b, p. 19). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Of course, there is more to Marxism on power than a perspective on international rela tions. Marxist work on power in human geog raphy first made its mark through a critique of behavioural and pluralist models of power. These models, developed by political scientists such as Robert Dahl to look at power coali tions in US cities, emphasized the overt and dispersed nature of power. Power could be observed when A made an open attempt to force B to do something that s/he would not otherwise do. If A succeeded, s/he had power in this ?issue area?. Happily, however, or so Dahl (1963) concluded, B would probably exercise power over A in another issue area. Given the nature of democracy in the USA, power was hard to monopolize. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Radical scholars disagreed. Steven Lukes (2005) argued that this view of power was one dimensional. The work of power was most often done in smoke filled rooms and in the setting of agendas. Lukes referred to this as two dimensional power, and he did not stop there. Lukes further argued, as did many Marxist geographers (see marxist geog raphy), that not only were agendas bent to serve certain cLass interests (not least through the state), but also that many people at the wrong end of power were unable to see their powerlessness. In part, this is because of what Marxists call ?false consciousness?. Ordinary people cannot see their ?objective interests?, because their political antennae have been deadened by years of watching sport, shopping in the mall or buying into the dream of a better life within capitaLism (see ideoLogy). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the 1980s, cultural and political geog raphers began to explore some of these con structions of hegemony, drawing usefully on the work of Antonio Gramsci. feminist geog raphies also explored the different ways in which relations of patriarchy were embedded and understood in different parts of the world (Rose, 1993), and explored questions of resistance to power, including discussions of the weapons of the weak (Hart, 1991; see feminist geography). In the 1990s these explorations were significantly extended as geographers began to draw more broadly on the work of Michel Foucault, and through him the work of Edward Said and other theorists of post coLoniaLism or post structuraLism. John Allen (2003) has suggested that power can be thought of as an inscribed capacity inhering in certain agents and networks; as a resource; and as a set of strategies, dis courses and technologies of government (see biopower; discipLinary power; governmen tALity). This last view of power begins to hint at the richness of Foucault?s legacy to the human sciences. Foucault (2001) recognized, as some of his followers have not, that power can be enabling. For the most part, however, geographers have read Foucault as a guide to the ways in which power inhabits and flows through all of the ?capillaries? of modern life. They have also taken from Foucault the notion that power is strongly territorialized. It is embedded in jurisdictions that run from the human body (powerfully disciplined by ideas of ?normal? sexuality, for instance), through the organization of schools, hospitals, asylums (Philo, 2004) and prisons, and on to the con struction of boundaries that express ideas of inclusion and exclusion. Power, in this view, can be challenged, critiqued and contested this is the job of an oppositional social science (NEW PARAGRAPH) but it cannot be transcended: the line to Foucault runs through Weber and Nietzsche more strongly than it does from Marx. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The idea that power animates all spatial practices, and that power is always spatialized, is now widely understood in geography. So too is the idea that power is most effective when it is least visible. criticaL human geog raphy seeks to denaturalize some of the most powerful discourses that are at play in the subject ideas of deveLopment, for example, or the west, or whiteness. In so doing, it aims to reveal other ways of assembling power and knowledge. At the same time, however, as Harvey?s work on the new imperiaLism (NEW PARAGRAPH) reveals, some geographers are also concerned to keep their eyes focused on materialist con ceptions of power, and the powers of capitaL and the state. When it was revealed that the Bush administration in the USA was pursuing a policy of ?extraordinary rendition? (the alleged torturing of suspected ?terrorists? in prison camps outside the USA), it became clear that work on the sovereign powers of states (Agamben, 1998: see exception, space of) had to be linked to work on spatial strat egies of demarcation, Othering and distancia tion (see Gregory, 2004b, on the Israel Palestine conflict), and to robust accounts of the deployment of US power in an age of Neo LiberaLism (Smith, 2005a). sco (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and Veron (NEW PARAGRAPH) ; Gregory (2004b); Lukes (2005); Mamdani (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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