[Peace-discuss] FW: Transnational Seminar Friday 3 pm: Anirudh Krisha on poverty researchin 5 countries

[Lisa Chason]

Friday’s speaker is particularly interesting. Anirudh Krishna’s work is
well known in development studies. Working with the World Bank he went
against the Bank’s social capital fad and introduced an entirely different
critical variable: capable agency. His current research concerns poverty and
his approach goes against the grain of poverty reduction in the Millennium
Development Goals and the World Bank by arguing that for all the attention
focused on poverty (with meager results), vulnerability, or the risk of
falling into poverty, is rising, so policy should shift to poverty
prevention, not merely alleviation. His work also runs counter to the
‘India Everywhere’ promotion by highlighting the dark side of India’s
development. That his empirical research concerns five countries in three
continents and in addition includes communities in the rural United States
is unusual and compelling. Part of the strength of his work is his deep
policy experience in the Indian Administrative Service prior to doing
research. (JNP)



The paper is available at
http://www.soc.uiuc.edu/about/Transnational/4-27-07%20Transnational%20Semina
r.pdf







Transnational Seminars



Sociology ● Geography ● Global studies ● Gender and women ●

Global studies in education ● Urban and regional planning



April 27 2007, Friday 3 pm

Lincoln Hall 336



Anirudh Krishna

Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Duke University



Are more people becoming vulnerable to poverty?

Evidence from grassroots investigations in five countries



Discussant: Manisha Desai, Sociology UIUC



ABSTRACT

Empirical work in India, Uganda, Peru and Kenya shows that volatility and
vulnerability have increased for poorer households. Similar trends apply to
rural communities in the United States. The blind rush to faster economic
growth has shut our eyes to the impoverishment that has been occurring in
parallel. Very large numbers of people are falling into poverty and these
numbers, instead of falling, have tended to become larger in more recent
times. Prevalent data collection methods are not designed to measure
vulnerability and little or no policy attention is being paid to the
increase in vulnerability. The micro-level data examined here as well as
macro-level examinations by other analysts show, however, that largely
because of unavailable or unaffordable healthcare, increasing numbers of
people are falling into poverty. Efforts to accelerate economic growth are
of little consequence, at least for poorer people, unless vulnerability can
be reduced and livelihoods rendered less volatile and current strategies of
poverty reduction may not impact growing vulnerability to poverty.



BIO

Anirudh Krishna (PhD in Government, Cornell 2000; MA Economics, Delhi 1980)
is assistant professor of public policy and political science at Duke
University. His research investigates how poor communities and individuals
in developing countries cope with the structural and personal constraints
that result in poverty and powerlessness. He has been examining poverty
dynamics at the household level, tracking movements into and out of poverty
of over 25,000 households in 225 varied communities of India, Kenya, Uganda,
Peru and North Carolina, USA (www.pubpol.duke.edu/krishna). New integrative
methodologies were developed for these investigations including a Social
Capital Assessment Tool and the Stages-of-Progress Method for tracking
household poverty dynamics. His work also examines how poor communities
interact with states and markets. Publications include Active Social
Capital: Tracing the Roots of Development and Democracy (Columbia UP, 2002),
Reasons for Success: Learning from Instructive Experiences in Rural
Development (Kumarian Press, 1998), Changing Policy and Practice From Below:
Community Experiences in Poverty Reduction (United Nations Press, 2000) and
Reasons for Hope: Instructive Experiences in Rural Development (Kumarian
Press, 1997). An article in Journal of Development Studies won the 2005
Dudley Seers Memorial Prize and his article on social capital and political
participation in Comparative Political Studies won best article award of the
American Political Science Association in 2003. Before turning to academia,
Krishna worked for 14 years in the Indian Administrative Service, where he
managed diverse initiatives in rural and urban development.









Jan Nederveen Pieterse

Sociology, University of Illinois

http://netfiles <http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jnp/www/> .uiuc.edu/jnp
<http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jnp> /www <http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jnp> /











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