1 - The Perspectives of the Study: Towards an Agonistics of Democracy

Summary

Poverty generates an intense focus on the present to the detriment of the future.

World Bank, 2015

It is always good to remind ourselves that people are not fools.

Michel de Certeau, 1983

This chapter clarifies the conceptual frameworks used in the book. I first outline the relational understandings of ‘poverty’ and ‘the poor’ to which my argument is indebted. I then pinpoint the relevance of a perspective that foregrounds politics as an ensemble of practices through which people conduct their lives. Thereafter, I introduce the agonistic approach to studying democracy which frames my argument. Following these conceptual clarifications, I offer an overview of early approaches to poor people's collective practices before engaging critically with the growing body of literature that locates poor people's negotiations within debates over universalism and particularism. Next, I propose the analytical framework of ‘political space’ as co-constituted by the dynamic intersection of institutional opportunity structures and social relations of power. Before concluding the chapter, I defend the ethnographic approach on which much of the data presented in this book draws.

Perspectives of poverty: Residualist or relational

Poverty is a fuzzy concept. Sometimes, people who are clearly not poor describe themselves as living in poverty. While it is not uncommon for pundits in the Anglo-Saxon West to label poor people as being wasteful and lazy, public opinion in much of the world generally steers away from holding alleged faults in their work ethic as responsible for poor people's poverty. Most commentators associate poverty with a lack of employment, educational opportunities and reliable social networks. Several economists, and following them, national governments and international donors refer to poor people's limited consumption of select bundles of commodities, usually stemming from low incomes. Sympathetic perceptions of the poor usually relate poverty to people being malnourished and ill. Of late, more multidimensional approaches to poverty10 are beginning to emphasize the ways in poverty is caused by deprivations of specific functioning, what Amartya Sen (1999) famously calls capabilities. In this vein, Table 1.1 presents a regional snapshot of the incidence of poverty, based on two enormously influential, but widely disparate measures. The presentation shows the ways in which the choice of measures influences inferences about the extent of poverty, complicating any attempt to develop a homogenous understanding of the term.