Poverty Studies
For this specialization we advise you to register in the Major Social Policy for Development (SPD), but other Majors also give access to this specialization.
It is now widely recognized that the first MDG goal of reducing ‘one-dollar-a-day’ poverty by half between 1990 and 2015 has not been achieved in most world regions outside of East Asia. |
The subject of poverty has long been a central concern of development studies since the origins of the field in the 1940s and 1950s. Poverty was even central to the origins of classical political economy in the late eighteenth century together with the early origins of modern social policy in the nineteenth century, such as with debates concerning the ‘Poor Laws’ in Victorian England or else colonial-induced famines in India and other colonies.
Nonetheless, poverty – especially multidimensional poverty – has been recently reasserted in the international development agenda as if a new focus, particularly since the early 1990s and as enshrined in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at the turn of the millennium. Some claim that this prioritization of poverty has been revolutionary; others claim that it actually represents a retreat into a very narrow vision of the meaning and goals of development, to the extent that the development debate has been reduced to a focus on monetary and, increasingly, multidimensional measures of poverty, and away from issues of inequality, employment, structural transformations, and unequal relations of power. With the next iteration of the MDGs due in 2015, this debate has again been heating up among international organizations and NGOs, particularly that it is now widely recognized that the first MDG goal of reducing ‘one-dollar-a-day’ poverty by half between 1990 and 2015 has not been achieved in most world regions outside of East Asia. Engaging with these debates and their policy implications require that we have a very solid footing in understanding how poverty is conceptualized and measured, and how the causes of poverty are related to broader understandings of development.
The development debate has been reduced to a focus on monetary and, increasingly, multidimensional measures of poverty, and away from issues of inequality, employment, structural transformations, and unequal relations of power. |
The interdisciplinary specialization in Poverty Studies will enable participants to engage with these debates by providing them with a comprehensive analytical capacity for understanding how poverty is conceptualized and measured, how the causes of poverty are related to broader understandings of development, and how these inform the formulation, design and evaluation of alternative anti-poverty strategies.
Poverty Studies Courses
Poverty, Gender and Social Protection: Debates, Policies and Transformative Interventions
Political Economy of Inclusive Growth
Teaching staff
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Erhard Berner holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and is Associate Professor of Development Sociology. He has done extensive research on urban poverty and community responses in the Philippines and elsewhere, and published a book and numerous articles on the subject. He has also served as a consultant to UN-Habitat, the World Bank, international and Dutch NGOs, and government institutions in the fields of urban poverty, housing, basic services, and small business promotion. Current research focuses on local effects of globalization, urban governance, microenterprises and poverty alleviation. Teaching experience includes universities and institutes in the Philippines, Indonesia, Uganda, Namibia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic and Germany.
For more information, see: www.iss.nl/berner
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Andrew Fischer is Senior Lecturer of Population and Social Policy and Convenor of the Social Policy for Development Major at ISS. A development economist by training and an interdisciplinary social scientist by conviction, he has been involved in studying, researching or working in development studies or in developing countries for over 25 years and on China’s regional development strategies in the Tibetan areas of Western China for more than ten years. His research generally deals with marginalised and/or disadvantaged peoples, focusing on how poverty and inequality are affected by patterns of population change, economic growth, social policy, aid, trade and finance. He has published widely on subjects related to China’s development and on the international development agenda more generally, particularly with respect to poverty, social exclusion, and social policy. He earned a PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics.
For more information, see www.iss.nl/fischer
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Max Spoor is Professor of Development Studies (in particular regarding economies in transition) and joined the ISS in 1991. He holds an endowed chair, installed by “Vereniging Trustfonds Erasmus Universiteit”. He is also the Chair of the ISS research Committee, and is the Co-ordinator of the Centre for the Study of Transition and Development (CESTRAD) at ISS, a specialised unit that promotes training, research, and international co-operation in the field of Transition and Development. He is a Visiting Professor at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI), and Honorary Guest Professor of the Nanjing Agricultural University (NJAU), China.Over the past decade he has undertaken and co-ordinated several institutional capacity-building projects, such as in China, Kazakhstan and Vietnam, and was involved in consultancy missions in a great number of countries (such as Armenia, Bangladesh, Benin, Chile, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Uzbekistan), for agencies as the ECLAC, UNDTCD, the EU, UNDP, EDI, and the Dutch Ministry of Development Co-operation.
For more information,see www.iss.nl/spoor
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Rolph van der Hoeven is Professor of Employment and Development Economics and Member of the Committee on Development Cooperation of the Dutch Government. Earlier he was Director of ILO's Policy Coherence Group, Manager of the Technical Secretariat of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, Chief Economist of UNICEF and policy analyst for the ILO in Ethiopia and Zambia. His work concentrates on issues of employment, inequality and economic reform on which he has widely published.
For more information, see www.iss.nl/vanderhoeven
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Amrita Chhachhi is Senior Lecturer in Women, Gender, Development. Her main areas of specialization are 1) gender, labour and globalisation/neoliberalism, social protection/human security, collective action, corporate social responsibility and labour market/ social policies and 2) gender, culture and globalisation with a focus on culture/identity, religious fundamentalisms, ethnic/communal conflict, peace initiatives and social movements. She has special expertise in the area of context specific curriculum development and tailor made training courses in the field of Women/Gender/ Labour/Conflict and Development. She has contributed to the establishment of Women/Gender Studies at the University of West Indies, University of Namibia, Dhaka University, Bangladesh and Aden University, Yemen.
For more information, see: www.iss.nl/chhachhi
poverty studies courses
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Poverty, Gender and Social Protection: Debates, Policies and Transformative Interventions
This course examines debates, policies and interventions aiming at poverty reduction. It provides an interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional gendered poverty lens to assess the experience of poverty/vulnerability/social exclusion and programs of social protection and poverty reduction. It provides a standpoint to address asymmetry in access to resources and the care economy, the opportunity for voice and ‘citizenship in practice’, and other aspects crucial to well-being such as self-respect, dignity, empowerment and participation. By linking issues of redistribution of resources with issues of recognition of multiple identities, subjectivity and agency, the course will enable students to conceptualize and apply an intersectional approach to social, economic and gender justice.
The first block of this course provides a brief introduction to new conceptualizations of poverty. It discusses key feminist concepts (e.g. the household, care economy) with special attention to shifts in conventional definitions and measurement of poverty and the heterogeneity of the poor. New conceptualisations are applied to critically assess Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) from an intersectional perspective exploring the implications of the privatization of social provisioning for human well-being.
The second block focuses on various targeting approaches for poverty alleviation schemes and interventions addressing different kinds of insecurity relating to precarious livelihoods, housing, and other dimensions of well being. Systems of social provisioning for the poor initiated by governments, NGOs and community based organisations (CBOs) are critically assessed in relation to the debate on commoditisation and de-commoditisation, and the differential outcomes of citizenship-based entitlements, employment-based entitlements or market-based entitlements as pathways out of poverty. These include corporate social responsibility, micro-credit, safety net programs, public employment schemes and slum upgrading.
In the third block, innovative and transformative interventions aiming at poverty reduction, social protection and socio-economic and gender justice are introduced. These include reformulated policies and social movement initiatives that incorporate the unpaid "care economy'', unconditional cash transfers/basic income, housing/land rights, and people/gender budget analysis. The course provides an in-depth assessment of the principle of universalism and extension of systems of social protection, regulation, and distribution for sustainable livelihoods and rights based development.
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Political Economy of Inclusive Growth
This course explores the question of how economic growth can be made more inclusive (or pro-poor) – and hence more effective in poverty reduction – from a (classical) political economy and structuralist framework. Structuralist in this sense refers to the issue of social and structural transformation as central to our understanding of modern economic development (e.g. transitions out of agriculture and into manufacturing and services, alongside urbanization). At the centre of this exploration is the issue of inequality and its role in economic development and poverty reduction.
The course begins with a review of theoretical issues relevant for developing an inclusive growth framework, including the importance of a (classical) political economy understanding of the economic dimensions of production, distribution and circulation/redistribution, as well as the interactions between inequality and economic growth, and the central role of employment (quantity, quality and wages) in the so called ‘growth-poverty nexus’.
The course is then divided into four blocks. Block One deals with three foundational modern models of inequality and growth that actually attempt to deal with a structural understanding of economic development (those of Simon Kuznets, Arthur Lewis and Celso Furtado), and compares these to typical mainstream and Marxist perspectives. In Block Two, the centrality of employment in the growth-poverty nexus is discussed, alongside global trends in employment and inequality. Block Three reviews a range of policy realms that governments can act upon in order to influence poverty, inequality and the inclusiveness of growth in a context of structural transformation, namely: productive policies (especially regarding agriculture, industry and infrastructure); trade policies; social policies; and macroeconomic policies (fiscal and monetary). The final block of the course is dedicated to student-led seminars – ideally linking a topic from the course to an issue in their research papers – and concludes with an assessment of the potential for inclusive growth in the contemporary context.
