Paper short abstract:

This paper assesses the merits and risks of measuring multidimensional poverty at the community-level. I first develop a framework to use 'community' as a unit of identification while recognizing horizontal inequalities and retaining ethical individualism. I then empirically apply this approach to the Appalachian context. I conclude by identifying this framework's possible uses and limitations.

Paper long abstract:

What are the possibilities and pitfalls of measuring multidimensional poverty at scales beyond the household? Despite the promises of the so-called ‘data revolution,’ household-level surveys remain infrequent, unrepresentative, and unreliable in many parts of the world. While artificial intelligence is steadily improving to fill in some of these gaps, populations that are under-researched or actively experiencing crises urgently require recognition. At the same time, the measurement of certain capabilities that do not neatly align to individual- or household-level deprivations—such as those related to environment or armed conflict—have recently attracted significant attention, yet it remains unclear how to integrate these complex capabilities into current measurement frameworks.

This paper explores the possibility of addressing these concerns by creating poverty measures at the community-level, providing both an analytical framework for doing so as well as an empirical example of how to apply such an approach. I first review past efforts to analyze and measure the capabilities of groups, a perspective that implies lighter data demands but threatens to overlook horizontal inequalities and to stray from ethical individualism. Drawing inspiration from how past poverty measures have translated deprivations between the household- and individual-levels, I develop a conceptual roadmap for how a poverty measure may be adapted to the community-level while retaining its focus on human capability, thereby placing the ‘community’ as its unit of identification but preserving the ‘individual’ as the unit of analysis. For this methodology to remain embedded in the human development tradition, I contend that a community-level index must be further supplemented with a qualitative, ethnographic account about how the measured deprivations interface with all members of a community. I lastly lay out a series of crucial caveats of this deeply imperfect approach and consider a few theoretical applications of it, such as generating exploratory data in the pursuit of narrative capability or allocating relief in areas experiencing crisis.

In the second section of this paper, I demonstrate the merits of the above approach by developing and applying a community-level measure in reference to central Appalachia. I begin by introducing the Alkire-Foster method—a ‘counting’ approach to multidimensional poverty measurement that facilitates both identification and aggregation—and Letcher County—the site of my research that lies in the Appalachian region of the southern United States and exhibits high poverty rates due to its extractive past. I then introduce and map the results of my community-level measure, whose indicators I developed based on participatory fieldwork in the county. Crucially, I then provide a qualitative account of how each of the measured dimensions—‘Infrastructure,’ ‘Natural disaster vulnerability,’ ‘Proximity to services,’ and ‘Common spaces’—interface with every member of a community regardless of his or her household characteristics. Though never able to perfectly capture human capability or parse out horizontal inequalities, this approach may be particularly gainful in the Appalachian context where household-level data are scarce and natural disaster relief funds are traditionally distributed through community organizations.

I conclude this paper by considering the relative merits of this approach. Pointing to the Appalachian example, I particularly highlight how a community-level measure could be used in moments of crisis or to approximate capabilities that don’t neatly map onto an atomized, household-level view of poverty. Nonetheless, I caution that this approach demands that researchers provide a qualitative account of how community-level deprivations interface with residents’ lived experiences of poverty, lest it risk misallocating development or relief funds. Poverty measures at scales beyond the household, I suggest, cannot serve as perfect substitutes for high-quality household surveys, but they may represent one gainful tool as long as they remain analytically embedded into individuals’ lived experiences of poverty.