Rethinking poverty: Empowerment and citizen rights

This paper is an attempt to reconfigure our thinking about 'structural' poverty, both North and South. After an excursion into the semantics of poverty - how we talk about it and what these ways of talking reveal about underlying assumptions and ideologies - the paper presents an empowerment model. The model focuses attention on the household economy and the resources required by households for the production of their livelihood. Household economies are conceived as integrating the moral economy of social relations with the exchange economy based on money transactions. Eight bases of social power, or livelihood resources, are identified. But massive poverty cannot be addressed by households acting on their own. In addition to local, community-based efforts, a major involvement by the state is essential to meet the massive resource needs of all those who are shut out from processes of global accumulation. In the final section, a social contract is proposed that would codify a new set of relations between state and society. But such a contract, intended to replace the moribund Keynesian welfare state, will only come about as a result of political action originating within civil society itself.