Increasingly It Is Recognized That Policy Design For Attacking Poverty Requires An Approach That Makes Best Use Of The Relative Strengths Of Qualitative And Quantitative Analytical Tools, Applied To The Situation At Hand. This Volume Brings Together The World Leaders In Analysis From Both Sides Of The Divide To Push The Dialogue Forward.
This work is about poverty in the Global South. It presents results from a wide range of mixed method, or Q-Squared (Q ) - combined qualitative and quantitative approaches - studies conducted in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America about who are poor and why.
The problem of poverty is global in scope and has devastating consequences for many essential aspects of life: health, education, political participation, autonomy, and psychological well-being. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty presents the current state of philosophical research on poverty in its breadth and depth. It features 39 chapters divided into five thematic sections: Concepts, theories, and philosophical aspects of poverty research Poverty in the history of Western philosophy and philosophical traditions Poverty in non-Western philosophical thought Key ethical concepts and poverty Social and political issues The handbook not only addresses questions concerning individual, collective, and institutional responsibility towards people in extreme poverty and the moral wrong of poverty, but it also tackles emerging applied issues that are connected to poverty such as gender, race, education, migration, and climate change. Additionally, it features perspectives on poverty from the history of Western philosophy, as well as non-Western views that explore issues unique to the Global South. Finally, the chapters in the first part provide an overview of the most important aspects of social science poverty research, which serves as an excellent resource for philosophers and philosophy students unfamiliar with how poverty is empirically researched in practice. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty is an essential resource for students and researchers in philosophy, political science, sociology, development studies, and public policy who are working on poverty.
China has made huge economic strides in recent decades but poverty is still a major issue on the agenda for rural China. Poverty and Development in China analyses how poverty is recognized and measured and how people in poverty are identified, literally asking: who is poor in China? Lu Caizhen’s research compares four approaches to poverty assessment: China’s official poverty identification method, the participatory approach to poverty assessment, the monetary approach, and use of multidimensional poverty indicators. Each of these is applied to the same population of households to identify the poor in rural Wuding County, Yunnan Province. The analysis shows that there is in fact very little overlap of households identified as poor by the various means, and that choice of approach does matter in the outcome of who is identified as poor. This has implications at the theoretical, methodological, and policy levels. Lu discusses these in detail, concluding that at present, there is a need to shift away from poverty reduction strategies that narrowly emphasize income generation activities, as these are often short-term efforts. Instead, the focus should move towards a broader combination of short-term and long-term strategies to break poverty’s inter-linked structural causes.
This book examines the underlying assumptions and implications of how we conceptualise and investigate poverty. The empirical entry point for such inquiry is a series of research initiatives that have used mixed method, combined qualitative and quantitative, or Q-Squared ( Q2) approaches, to poverty analysis. The Q2 literature highlights the vast range of analytical tools within the social sciences that may be used to understand and explain social phenomena, along with interesting research results. This literature serves as a lens to probe issues about knowledge claims made in poverty debates concerning who are the poor (identification analysis) and why they are poor (causal analysis). Implicitly or explicitly, questions are raised about the reasons for emphasising different dimensions of poverty and favouring different units of knowledge, the basis for distinguishing valid and invalid claims, the meaning of causation, and the nature of causal inference, and so forth. Q2 provides an entry point to address foundational issues about assumptions underlying approaches to poverty, and applied issues about the strengths and limitations of different research methods and the ways they may be fruitfully combined. Together, the strands of this inquiry make a case for methodological pluralism on the grounds that knowledge is partial, empirical adjudication imperfect, social phenomena complex, and mixed methods add value for understanding and explanation. Ultimately, the goals of understanding and explanation are best served if research questions dictate the choice of methodological approach rather than the other way around.
The Ethics of Global Poverty offers a thorough introduction to the ethical issues surrounding global poverty. It addresses important questions such as: What is poverty and how is it measured? What are the causes of poverty? Do wealthy individuals have a moral duty to reduce global poverty? Should aid go to those who are most in need, or to those who are easiest to help? Is it morally wrong to buy from sweatshops? Is it morally good to provide micro-finance? Featuring case studies throughout, this textbook is essential reading for students studying global ethics or global poverty who want an understanding of the moral issues that arise from vast inequalities of wealth and power in a highly interconnected world.
The question of how effective political tools actually are is among the most hotly debated in contemporary IR theory. There is no unanimity how to even measure the effectiveness and impact different political measures produce. This book comprehensively introduces social science students and scholars to the various fields of effectiveness and impact research in the study of international relations.
