Toward an Economic Sociology of Chronic Poverty: Enhancing the Rigor and Relevance of Social Theory

In recognizing that poverty is "multi-dimensional", contemporary policy discourses— drawing on scholarship on 'networks', 'exclusion', and 'culture'—have made important (if often under-appreciated) steps to incorporate insig hts from social and political theory, but these (hard-won) gains now need to be consolidated, advanced and sharpened. To build significantly on them, coherent theories of and use ful policy responses to chronic poverty require attention to three additional (and interrel ated) realms, which must cumulatively be able to (a) provide a clear but distinctive model o f human behavior, (b) explain how and why poverty persists as part of broader processes of ec onomic prosperity and social change, (c) account for the mechanisms by which power is created, maintained and challenged, and (d) readily lend themselves to informing (and iterative ly learning from) a new generation of supportable poverty reduction policies and practice s. These three additional realms—social relations, rules systems, and meaning systems—are deeply grounded in a long tradition of social and political theory, and offer an opportuni ty to take a next step towards more faithfully incorporating the full richness of socia l science into poverty policy and practice. 1 The views expressed in this paper are those of the author alone, and should not be attributed to the r espective organizations (or their executive directors) with w hich he is affiliated. An early version of this pap er was presented at the CPRC's 'Concepts and Methods for Analysing Poverty Dynamics and Chronic Poverty' conference, held at the University of Manchester in October 2006. I am grateful for the helpful receiv ed from participants at that conference, and to David Hulme for encouraging me to explore the issues raised he re. Address for correspondence: Mailstop MC3-306, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433, USA. Email: