From Multiple Deprivations to Exploitation: Politicizing the Multidimensional Poverty Index
The overarching point is that, absent a serious consideration of how to go about doing so, there is a risk that interventions targeting particular deprivations or clusters will wind up reinscribing them in a new form or indirectly intensifying pressures of indebtedness that have a bearing on other types of deprivation. Again, a relational perspective showing how processes of exploitation are connected to processes of capital accumulation is vital. Of significance here is that underlying the recourse to debt relations as mechanisms for widening access to basic services in the first place is arguably the radically uneven distribution of resources in the global political economy. The turn to various self-help or debt-based poverty alleviation interventions, and the wider ‘private turn’ in development financing in recent decades, has often expressly been justified in terms of the co-existence of restrictive fiscal constraints faced by peripheral states and deep pools of capital in global financial markets (see Bernards 2022, 2023).
Whether global poverty is rising or falling in any aggregate sense likely cannot be adequately determined and is arguably of less value than often assumed in terms of understanding how to address poverty. Aiming to understand the variegated shape that poverty assumes and the social relations that drive it, as well as the form that meaningful responses to poverty might take, could be a more helpful place to start. The MPI and other such indices no doubt are broadly useful in informing such understandings, but in their current form often serve to obscure more than they reveal.
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