Sustaining Poverty Escapes: The Holy Grail of Development, and Why Resilience Matters

I like talking about resilience. It makes sense to me as an anthropologist working with people and how they negotiate their lives.  I’m not too hung up on the precise definition of it; to me, the power is in the idea of working with complex systems in a process of learning, reflection and adaptation.

 A recent Asia Resilience workshop hosted by USAID in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation revealed many uses of the concept — and sometimes a little tension as to whether this is a problem.  

The idea of resilience is not new — but what idea ever is truly new?  The congruence between the language used to articulate resilience and the language surrounding sustainable livelihoods was striking — even in the proposed advantages being attributed to resilience thinking — e.g. that it helps engineers to talk to people in other sectors or that it works from strengths, not vulnerabilities.  This made me realise my age, as I remember people saying the same things about sustainable livelihoods approaches in 2001!  However, I don’t think there is much point in getting hung up on this.

As a community of practitioners, activists and policy makers, we have to learn to live with the ambiguity of definition. Almost all of the concepts that we use are internally constructed concepts that have no universally agreed-upon definition or measurement: Take “empowerment,” “social capital” or even “economic growth” as examples. The power of the resilience concept is not in the precision of definition or measurement but in understanding relationships and systems across levels, and in understanding the structures that enable or disable systemic resilience to shocks and stresses. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have to find ways of measuring resilience and system dynamics, we just have to remember that such measures are likely to be context-specific. 

I was invited to the Asia Resilience workshop to share the research of the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN) based at ODI in London. In the latest Chronic Poverty Report, we use a combination of panel survey data and life histories to explore how people get stuck in chronic poverty, how some move out of poverty and how some will slip back into poverty. 

Our data shows that even in the countries with the greatest declines in poverty headcounts, around 20% of those who escape poverty in one time period will fall back into poverty by the later survey point. (The period between panel surveys varies in duration from 2-11 years depending on the source of the data.) Escapes from poverty were not resilient to shocks and stresses and therefore not sustained. For example, the graph below presents analysis based on panel data for selected countries, revealing that descents into poverty can be nearly as great as (or greater than) escapes from poverty over particular periods.

In the Chronic Poverty Report, we describe policies and interventions that target all three stages of the “poverty tripod” — tackling chronic poverty, stopping impoverishment once people experience a period of improvement, and sustaining poverty escapes.  As further explored in my presentation at the USAID/Rockefeller Foundation Asia Resilience workshop, we are especially interested in these latter two stages — escapes from poverty and how such escapes can be sustained.  

Even people who are classified as non-poor (having crossed the $1.25 threshold, the value at the time of this research) remain extremely vulnerable to falling back into poverty, because crossing an arbitrary poverty line does not suddenly transform people’s resilience to shocks and stresses. For example, a family health emergency may propel a family back into poverty as they sell their productive assets to care for a family member. 

Longer term trends such as climate change and the climate-related shocks that come with it will present a serious risk of increased impoverishment. Tackling (re)-impoverishment is assisted by policies that help prevent conflict; enable systems and households to better manage risks from disasters as well as routine economic vulnerability; and insure against risks like old age, weather, and asset loss.  

Our evidence suggests that sustained escapes from poverty require strong and redistributive investment in human capital (e.g. education and health) by the state and private investors, as well as investment in sectors that provide decent and reliable work through inclusive economic growth. Other key components include land policy reforms enabling accumulation of land by capable smallholders, progressive regional and local policies, and universal access to sexual and reproductive health.

In the coming months, ODI and USAID will partner, through the Leveraging Economic Opportunities (LEO) project, to further explore the reality of “backsliding” into impoverishment, and how USAID programming can better facilitate sustained escapes from poverty. Stay tuned for resources and country case studies in this area in 2016.

The idea of resilience can help us to ask questions about how just societies distribute resources in the face of environmental challenges. The questions are not easy but we are going to have to try to answer them. That is what we said about sustainable livelihoods too but the political will was not there!