Review: Breaking the Poverty Cycle The Human Basis for Sustainable Development

Abstract

BREAKING THE POVERTY CYCLE The Human Basis for Sustainable Development Susan Pick and Jenna Sirkin New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 336pp. $49.95 cloth ISBN 978-0-19-538316-4Poverty is one of most loaded concepts in social sciences. Scholars have tried to define and measure it in many ways, most of which faU short of problem's multifaceted reality. Susan Pick and Jenna Sirkin's Breaking Poverty Cycle is a welcome addition to this debate. The book focuses on efforts of Mexican Institute of Family and Population Research, whose foundation in 1984 was inspired by Robert Hartman's theories on human values, Martin Fishbein's work on psychosocial development, and Amartya Sen's capability approach. In her preface, Pick offers a snapshot of problems that underlie persistent poverty in Mexico. In a series of interviews with women from one of Mexico City's poorest shantytowns, Pick discovered a lack of responsibility. The women thought that they did not and could not control circumstances of their lives, a syndrome that is widespread in Mexican society among both individuals and institutions.Drawing on Sen's capability approach to development, authors examine framework for enabling empowerment, which aims to promote inner responsibility by emphasizing personal and intrinsic empowerment. The framework challenges prevailing Mexican norms of fatalism, sexism, and paternalism by promoting an agency culture (44). It tries to encourage people to move beyond these social barriers to realize their fuU potential. Pick and Sirkin endeavour to show how enabling individuals to enhance their capabilities, and thus their potential, can have an effective and sustainable impact in combating poverty (xiii). Without this agentoriented view of development through expanding choice and freedoms, they argue, development is limited because individuals find it difficult to participate in societies in which they live (10).The framework laudably aims to reorient governmental and civU society programs toward encouraging personal and intrinsic empowerment, but this approach cannot work everywhere. It is unclear, for instance, how it might apply to authoritarian regimes or hyper-patriarchal societies. Pick and Sirkin argue that the ideal conditions for development occur when governments and institutions create opportunities rather than exercise their power only to establish constraints or facilitate assistance-based aid (168). But they pay less attention than they should to ways in which broader societal context can constrain opportunities for individuals to empower themselves. …