Poverty, vulnerability, social protection and support networks: what role does measurement play?.
Panel P16 at conference DSA2020: New Leadership for Global Challenges.
This panel explores the interface between poverty, vulnerability, social protection and social relations. While research in each of these areas has rapidly expanded in the last decade, few studies have explored their interactions. This panel particularly focuses on issues of measurement.
Long Abstract:
Literature on poverty measurement (multidimensional poverty in particular) and on social protection as a mechanism for reducing poverty have expanded rapidly in the last decade, and continue to be large and exciting areas of research and practice. Increasingly, these areas of work also focus on the role of relations and support networks. Positive relationships have an intrinsic value in living a good life; support networks play an instrumental role in moving out of poverty as well as mitigating vulnerability to poverty; and social protection can both strengthen and undermine social relations and networks. Nevertheless, gaining insight into the interface between poverty, vulnerability, social protection and support networks is by no means straightforward and these constructs are notoriously difficult to measure.
The Study Group on Multidimensional Poverty and Poverty Dynamics proposes a paper panel on the interplay between poverty, vulnerability, social protection and support networks, with a particular focus on measurement.
Our panel welcomes papers that focus on: (i) proposing novel forms of measurement that capture the significance of social relations and enables insights into the role of social protection in supporting or undermining these; and (ii) exploring the effect of social protection on social relations and support networks using novel forms of measurement or analysis. We welcome papers with different methodological approaches, including quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods approaches. We also encourage PhD students and early career researchers.
Presenters are asked to submit 3-4 page draft papers in advance of their presentation, thereby encouraging presentation of work-in-progress or unpublished work.
Displacements, even development-induced) tend to decrease the psychological well-being of the displaced by making them more vulnerable to poverty through disruptions of social networks. We look into this issue in the context of displacements caused by construction of Metro Line in Lahore City.
Paper long abstract:
Human displacements, even development-induced) tend to decrease the well-being of the displaced households by making them more vulnerable to poverty. The evidence in this context primarily pertains to economic impacts of displacements with little attention being paid to non-economic, psychological well-being of the displaced. Further, the disruption of social networks in exacerbating the negative impacts on psychological well-being is also rarely accounted for in empirical literature. Against this backdrop, this paper firstly measures the psychological well-being of the displaced people in metropolitan city of Lahore due to the construction of Metro project and further highlights important role of social networks. The data set of 165 Households-comprised of 90 displaced and 75 non-displaced families- is gathered through Self-administered questionnaire and semi-structured interviews of stakeholders. psychological well-being of the displaced versus non-displaced families is measured through control and treatment groups and further Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression technique is employed to examine the significance of social connections in mitigating the toll of psychological costs and risk factors (homelessness, joblessness, increased morbidity/health, disruption of education activities) encountered by displaced families during and after the process of displacement. Our findings suggest that psychological well-being of the displaced households is significantly lower than non-displaced. Further, the presence of social connections significantly mitigates the negative impacts of risk factors on psychological well-being of the displaced households. The qualitative findings also suggest that during the process of displacement , disruptions of social networks further marginalizes the well-being of displaced families thus making them more vulnerable to poverty.
Social capital networks have been found to be part of the solution to reduce human vulnerability due to high poverty rate among others factors. Social capital facilitates access to financial benefits and improve welfare thereby reducing poverty level of households.
Paper long abstract:
Evidences from literature suggests that social support or capital plays an important role in the analysis of economic activities and human well-being. It has been used not only in traditional models for individual economic growth but also as a variable able to capture differences in quality of life, social exclusion, and poverty among countries or local communities. The study was carried out in Ogun State, Nigeria and it assess the effect of social capital and support network on poverty status of rural households in Nigeria. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to select 245 rural households for the study. Three principal types of measures of social protection, capital and network support was used to reduce household poverty and vulnerability level. The first approach measure social relations directly: assessing the number, structure, or properties of relationships among individuals. The second approach measure social capital based on measuring individuals' beliefs about their relationships with others while the third approach uses measures of membership in certain voluntary organizations to assess the level of social capital and network. Findings from the study revealed that both social protection, capital and support network were poverty reducing variables. The study therefore recommends that social protection and network support as an asset can help the dissemination of information useful to the poor and this has a multiple effect on the economy at large by improving growth and income redistribution; it should therefore be encouraged because it helps to reduce poverty in the rural sector in Nigeria.
Social support represents a key element for reducing everyday hardships in the Global South yet remains predominantly understood through a policy lens. I re-position the lens using a mixed methods approach to personal networks to provide new insights on the role and diversity of social support.
Paper long abstract:
A growing consensus points to the quality and quantity of social relations playing an essential role in people's life and well-being. Particularly in the Global South, there is strong evidence showing that social support represents a key element for reducing everyday hardships. Yet, support relations remain almost exclusively understood through a policy lens, typically labelled as informal safety nets or informal social protection.
In this paper I reposition the lens. Using a mixed method approach to personal networks, I describe and measure the role of social relations and their varying reasons and intentions; particularly accounting for a person's socioeconomic context. Therefore, I draw on 205 personal networks containing support activities reported by adult Namibians residing in Windhoek. I demonstrate how activities range from ad-hoc gestures, daily habits, mutual favours, to long-term investments into someone else's future; providing a glimpse into shared and lived experiences of persons and their immediate contacts. Thereby, they constitute mechanisms which are not necessarily well-crafted and carry the foresight of co-crafting someone's socioeconomic position as reflected in formal provisions of support.
I use these insights to address literature which frames social support networks as 'informal'. Conceptualizing social support as informal social welfare puts it into the same conceptual space as the state and might impose rationales to social practices meriting different labels and intentions. I show how personal networks can provide a novel framework of measurement, which allows capturing the diversity of social support and social relations to revisit understandings of informal forms of social protection.
The combined use of qualitative longitudinal research and social network analysis is used to provide insights into the interaction between social relationships and social protection using the LEAP programme.We show how heterogeneity in prior social relationships drive variation in the wellbeing
Paper long abstract:
The paper explores how social relationships mediate the effects of social protection programmes on poverty and wellbeing. Cash transfers, for example, affect our physical state and how we think, feel and act via social relationships both positively (e.g. allowing us to thank friends with a gift) and negatively (e.g. prompting jealousy among our neighbours). To the extent that social relationships are highly heterogeneous and contextual so, it follows, are the causal mechanisms and wellbeing outcomes of social protection.
This paper demonstrates these propositions by drawing on qualitative longitudinal research into social relationships and the wellbeing of urban recipients of cash transfers under Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme in Ghana.
Using repeat visits to 18 recipients over a year, and adapting a social network approach, the research built up a detailed picture of respondents' informal support networks, and their perception of how their wellbeing was affected by receipt of LEAP transfers. This revealed (a) wide diversity in the relationship between poverty and social relationships among respondents, as well as (b) how these differences resulted in the same transfer entitlement having divergent wellbeing outcome through time. This in turn reveals the methodological limitations of attempting to assess the wellbeing effects of cash transfers and social protection with reference to direct material effects alone, without reference to how they interact with mediating social relationships.
This paper explores measurement gaps in the design and implementation of cash-transfer social protection programmes under the Nigerian NASSP with a proposal of methodologies to address identified inclusion and exclusion errors.
Paper long abstract:
Implemented by thee National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) under the office of the Nigerian Presidency, the Nigerian National Social Safety Nets Programme was designed to support households and individuals living below the poverty line of $2 United States Dollars per day. Intervention programmes under NASSP includes cash based transfer programs for households in the most economic at-risk communities in Nigeria. Since its launching in 2016, over one million beneficiaries have been reported as benefiting from the program implemented in more than 20 of the 36 states in Nigeria.
Despite the implementation spread of its initiatives, extensive inclusion and exclusion errors were discovered during a gender analysis study conducted in 2018. These errors derives mainly from the use of Community Based Targeting (CBT) and Proxy Means Test (PMT) in eligibility estimations for eligibility and selection criteria for cash transfer beneficiaries. Consequences of these errors are severe considering the focus of cash transfer programs on extremely vulnerable communities, especially internally displaced persons in the Nigerian North-East and North-West.
Using insights from quantitative and qualitative data from 1,017 respondents across 58 communities during the gender analysis, this paper provides an in-depth exploration of different manifestations and outcomes of these errors. This paper concludes by highlighting the value of inclusion and exclusion gradients for different categories of beneficiaries as a critical first step in addressing CBT/PMT design errors, especially for IDPs, poor urban households and women living in polygnous households.
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