Bringing politics back into poverty analysis:
Why understanding social relations
matters more for policy on chronic poverty
than measurement
John Harriss, May 2007
School for International Studies
Simon Fraser University Vancouver
515 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6B 5K3
jharriss@sfu.ca
CPRC Working Paper 77
Chronic Poverty Research Centre
ISBN 1-904049-76-1
John Harriss is an anthropologist with long-standing interests in the political economy of
development, especially in regard to South Asia. A former Dean of the School of
Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Development
Studies Institute at the London School of Economics, he is now Director of the School for
International Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers of a draft of this paper, to Robert Chambers and to
John Sender for their comments, and to Jonathan Pincus for sharing with me the conference
paper cited in the text. I am particularly grateful to David Hulme for the opportunity of writing
the paper.
This paper was presented at the CPRC Workshop on Concepts and Methods for Analysing
Poverty Dynamics and Chronic Poverty, 23 to 25 October 2006, University of Manchester,
UK. See http://www.chronicpoverty.org/news events/ConceptsWorkshop-Oct2006.htm
Abstract
Mainstream poverty research – even after experts had generally accepted the need for a
multidimensional view of poverty that goes beyond income/consumption measures to take
account of holdings of assets and hence of longer run security (see Chambers 1988, 1992) –
has generally failed to address the dynamic, structural and relational factors that give rise to
poverty. There is a great deal of technically sophisticated research, much of it based on
household surveys, that has provided ever more detailed profiles of poverty in different
countries and regions. This research ha