Abstract
ABSTRACT Poverty is now widely recognised as multidimensional, with indicators including healthcare, housing and sanitation. Yet, relational approaches that foreground political-cultural processes remain marginalised in policy discourses. Focusing on India, we review a wide range of relational approaches to rural poverty. Beginning with early approaches that focus on structural reproduction of class, caste and to a lesser extent gender inequality, we examine new relational approaches developed in the last two decades. The new approaches examine diverse ways in which poverty is experienced and shapes mobilisations against deprivation. They draw attention to poor people’s own articulations of deprivation and alternate conceptions of well-being. They also show how intersecting inequalities of class, caste and gender shape governance practices and political movements. Despite these important contributions, the new relational approaches pay limited attention to technologies and ecologies in shaping the experience of poverty. Reviewing studies on the Green Revolution and wider agrarian transformations in India, we then sketch the outlines of a hybrid relational approach to poverty that combines socio-technical and -ecological dynamics. We argue that such an approach is crucial to challenge narrow economising discourses on poverty and to bridge the policy silos of poverty alleviation and (environmentally) sustainable development.
Highlights
The last two decades are witness to a vigorous debate on the measurement of poverty in India and its implications for development policy and planning (Deaton and Kozel 2005)
Emphasising the latter political agency, scholars argue that for the rural poor, development interventions become sites for challenging the dominant meanings of poverty and well-being, and the oppressive social relations such as those based on caste and gender (Jakimow 2015; Roy 2014)
Rather than reducing people to economistic individual subjects defined by deprivation, new relational approaches highlight agency through enactments and conceptualisations of diverse ways of living a ‘good life’, amidst contexts of manufactured scarcity and dispossession (Singh 2015)
Summary
The last two decades are witness to a vigorous debate on the measurement of poverty in India and its implications for development policy and planning (Deaton and Kozel 2005). While the overall thrust of the new relational approaches is on different mechanisms constituting pathways into poverty, some scholars highlight how many social security entitlements are policy responses to civil society mobilisations (Khera and Nayak 2011; Drèze and Khera 2017) Emphasising the latter political agency, scholars argue that for the rural poor, development interventions become sites for challenging the dominant meanings of poverty and well-being (as discussed above), and the oppressive social relations such as those based on caste and gender (Jakimow 2015; Roy 2014). Complementing social welfare policies, promotion of diverse SD pathways may be necessary for addressing persistent social, ecological and technological vulnerabilities confronting small farmers and landless workers
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