Governments are obliged under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to eradicate extreme poverty and to halve other forms of poverty by 2030.  However, there is little prospect that these objectives will be achieved.  The reasons for this failure are explored in this paper through the lens of human rights.

 

There is much confusion as to the meaning of poverty.  Four competing concepts of poverty are found in the SDGs: absolute and relative (income) poverty; capability poverty; and multidimensional poverty.  The result is divisive.  Lower income countries are prescribed more challenging goals, while higher income countries are free to choose less exacting targets.  The competing concepts can be reconciled, and a single measure of poverty should in future be used worldwide to capture the multiple dimensions that constrain basic freedoms.

 

Irrespective of the conceptualisation, poverty results from the unfair primary and secondary distribution of resources.  Shaped by the legacy of history, poverty is reproduced daily by market forces and the failure governments and international organisations adequately to alter the primary distribution of incomes.  The failure to rebalance trade in favour of developing countries and the weakness of SDG17 in ensuring international cooperation point to infringement of the global right to development adopted in 1986.

 

Poverty can only be adequately addressed through an effective international partnership that supports global governance to resolve the problem of unbalanced and inadequate development.  This requires reform of global institutions, including the eventual democratisation of the United Nations, which ensures that international organisations responsible for development and global trade no longer primarily serve the interests of developed countries.

 

Ahead of such reforms, which will be resisted by forces intent on the perpetuation of economic and political hegemony, and beyond the Global Development Initiative, it is imperative to implement basic social protection in the world’s poor countries.  Unfortunately, few leaders care about the rights and poverty of people living in other jurisdictions.

 

 

Beijing Normal University

 

Professor Emeritus and Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College,

 

University of Oxford

 

robert.walker@spi.ox.ac.uk

 

(4,786 words excluding references)

 

Poverty is the lack of money and money-like resources and its immediate consequences; hence, it is intrinsically multidimensional.  It can be the result of an infringement of human rights and result in the non-enjoyment of human rights.   Some consider poverty itself be an infringement of human rights.

 

Irrespective of whether poverty is considered to curtail human rights, it is universally agreed that poverty should be reduced or eliminated.  No national leader advocates increasing poverty.  The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) demand the eradication of extreme poverty and all other levels of poverty are meant to be halved by 2030.   

 

The fact that these goals are unlikely to be met is a warning that human rights are about to be infringed on a global scale: 

 

.. government action or inaction leading to poverty, or government failure to respond adequately to the conditions that create, exacerbate and perpetuate poverty and marginalization often reflect – or are closely connected with – violations or denials of human rights.” (Braveman and Gruskin, 2003)

 

This contribution introduces and reconciles the different definitions of poverty by embedding them within a human rights discourse, discusses the causes of global poverty highlighting infringements of the right to development, advocates reform of global governance to support the rights to development and freedom from poverty, and demands immediate implementation of a Global Social Protection Fund to protect the most basic of rights, survival.

 

 

While everyone knows poverty when they see it (Ringen, 1988) and agree that it must at least be reduced, there is much less accord about what poverty is and, indeed, sometimes fierce disputes between competing schools of thought.  These disputes have resulted in at least four different concepts being embraced within the rubric of the SDGs, only one of which is defined.  It is unclear whether this overidentification of the concept of poverty (its multiple meanings) was due to constructive ambiguity necessary for agreement, to oversight or to lack of understanding.  Whatever the reason, the result is that the aspiration that the SDGs were to be universal, applying to all nations irrespective of level of development, remains unfulfilled.

 

Two of the different conceptualisations of poverty are apparent in the first two targets associated with the first SDG goal: 

 

 

 

Extreme poverty (Target 1.1) is defined as per capita income necessary for physical survival.  Poverty defined in this way without reference to national living standards is often called absolute poverty and is most prevalent in low- and low-middle income countries. 

 

Target 1.2 refers to multidimensional poverty with governments free to choose the definition, mode of measurement and the poverty threshold.  Moreover, comparatively few countries use an indigenous measure of multidimensional poverty as part of their domestic policy agenda.  Most high-income countries use a third concept of poverty – relative poverty - that reflects national living standards and the possibility of social participation; typically, a poverty threshold set as a proportion of median disposable household income.  Adding to the conceptual confusion the proportion of people living below 50 per cent of median income - a measure of relative poverty - is included in the SDGs as an indicator of progress towards Target 10.2: “By 2030, to empower and promote social, economic and political inclusion of all”.  However, there is no obligation on governments to reduce relative poverty thus defined.

 

The fourth conception of poverty evident in the SDGs is poverty as an infringement of human rights.  Poverty, then, is not simply a matter of material inadequacy but is recognised to be a manifestation of unequal social and power relationships that embraces the way in which people in poverty are treated.  This, therefore, creates an affirmative agenda based on dignity and respect (Lister 2020).  However, while many argue that this perspective underpins the entire UN 2030 Agenda, human rights poverty is not explicitly included among the SDG targets (Crabtree and Gasper, 2020).   

 

Whether or not the inclusion of different conceptions of poverty was necessary to reach agreement on the SDGs, the result is, as already demonstrated, divisive.  Equally, it sows confusion and instigates ambiguity that prevents governments being held to account, thereby increasing the chances that SDG1 will be missed and, hence, that human rights will be directly infringed.

 

Advocates of the four approaches to understanding poverty are divided by disciplines, cultures and ideology and have found reconciliation difficult over many years.  In broad terms, the human rights perspective had its origins in the global South whereas the other measures have long been used in the North: absolute income poverty is often advocated by economists; relative poverty by sociologists; and multidimensional poverty by psychologists, certain economists and, recently, by many NGOs.

 

Stripped of their adversarial history, the four perspectives on poverty should be seen as integrative.  Had they been so earlier, the discriminatory nature of SDG Target 1.1 and 1.2 could have been avoided.  

 

With poverty defined as inadequate money and money-like resources and its immediate consequences, money and income-based measures are clearly partial measures of measures of poverty.  It is an empirical question how well measures of income predict the nature of the immediate consequences – the other dimensions of poverty. 

 

The MPI is said to reflect the influential thinking of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen.  He focussed on “capabilities”, that is the “freedom” that people enjoy due to a “real, or substantive, opportunity” to achieve (or to be) what they desire (Robeyns and Fibieger Byskov, 2021).  Sen has repeatedly refused to offer a definitive list of capabilities but does write about “basic capabilities” that embrace “the freedom to do some basic things considered necessary for survival and to avoid or escape poverty or other serious deprivation”.  Poverty is thus defined as “the failure of basic capabilities to reach certain minimally acceptable levels” (Sen, 1992, p. 45 and p.109).  

 

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR, 2004, p. 7) has argued that “once poverty is seen to consist in the failure of a range of basic capabilities, it immediately becomes a multidimensional concept” and that Sen’s capability approach therefore provides “a conceptual bridge between the discourses on poverty and human rights” (OHCHR, 2004).  Capability theory links poverty to human rights through the former’s denial of freedom and dignity since “the concern for human dignity also motivates the human rights approach, which postulates that people have inalienable rights to these freedoms” (OHCHR, 2004, p. 9).  

 

Given that poverty is only one cause of the denial of human rights and must be distinguished from others, the OHCHR stipulates that:

 

Inadequate command over economic resources must play a role in the causal chain leading to the non-fulfilment of human rights. (OHCHR, 2004, p. 10).  

 

Thus, with income broadly defined as economic resources, this stipulation serves to connect the human rights and capability approaches to poverty with the income-deficit model.  Moreover, the human rights approach can, and should, encapsulate the unity of absolute and relative definitions of poverty through the concept of the progressive realisation of rights.  Poverty thresholds – indexing access to basic freedoms – should therefore rise with economic and social development and reflect associated changes in what is socially desirable and economically and politically achievable.  Hence, the OHCHR’s Guiding Principles on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty adopted in 2012 should be extended to embrace all types and levels of poverty.

 

The Guiding Principles (UN, 2012, p. 10) affirm the need to: “ensure the active, free, informed and meaningful participation of persons living in poverty at all stages of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of decisions and policies affecting them”. Deliberative participation conducted in six countries on four continents at diverse stages of development, indicates that poverty may everywhere have nine dimensions that constrain basic freedoms.  Replicated using different methodology in China, there is now the prospect of assessing - and responding to - the poverty status of anyone in the world according to the same nine indicators, albeit nuanced by location and environment, timing, identity, and culture (Yang et al., 2021). In 2019, the OECD Secretary General committed the organisation “to work hard to develop additional measures that capture” the new dimensions[ Dimensions includes Lack of decent work; Insufficient and insure income; Material and social deprivation; Social maltreatment; Institutional maltreatment; Unrecognised contribution; Disempowerment; Suffering in body, mind and heart; Struggle and resistance.

 

] (Gurria, 2019).

 

 

Poverty, whether conceptualised as being absolute, relative, multi-dimensional or an infringement of human rights, results from the unfair primary and secondary distribution of resources.  The primary distribution is market driven.  It takes place within and between countries through the production and sale of goods at home or/and abroad which generate income in the form of wages and returns on assets and investments.  

 

The secondary distribution is that engineered by governments through taxation and transfers which determine the resources that populations can access and deploy.  For the most part, the secondary distribution currently takes place within nation states but does occur between national states in the form of overseas development assistance (ODA), discounted loans made available by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and charitable aid dispensed by non-governmental organisations.  

 

Today’s pattern of poverty and inequality has its origins deep in history.  To illustrate, differences in the per capita GDP of countries in 1870, that is before the first wave of globalisation associated with colonisation, explained 50 per cent of the variation in national incomes as recently as 2008 (Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2017).  Equally remarkable is the increase in the scale of inequality witnessed in the twentieth century and subsequently.  In 1870, per capita incomes in Western Europe were about four times those in Africa; by 2008, this difference in incomes had tripled.  

 

However, inequality and poverty are being reproduced everyday due to market forces and because of the failure of governments adequately to alter the primary distribution of income.  This is recognised in the SDGs in that nations signing up to the SDGs accept “primary responsibility for [their] own economic and social development”. 

 

Equally, it is recognised that eradicating poverty will require “a global partnership” to “work in a spirit of global solidarity, in particular solidarity with the poorest” (UN, 2015, para. 39). Without the proactive support of richer nations, the least economically developed states will not attain SDG1 and eradicate extreme poverty, while some lower middle-income countries will have difficulty halving poverty with the threshold set at poverty US$3.20/day.

 

The nominal commitment to this cosmopolitan partnership is evident in the SDG implementation targets, such as Target 1.a concerning the mobilization of resources.  However, SDG17, which aims to “strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development”, defines the form of partnership and establishes the basis of accountability.  

 

SDG17 has 19 targets - more than for any other goal.  The targets, which embrace finance, technology, capacity-building and trade, arguably establish the foundations and the infrastructure for meeting the SDGs.  They additionally address such systemic issues as policy and institutional coherence, multi-stakeholder partnerships, monitoring, and accountability.  Given the importance of SDG17, it is understandable that more time was spent developing the associated targets than for any other goal.  However, the reality is that much of discussion time was consumed by richer countries resisting the demands of the G77 and China negotiating block of developing countries which they largely succeeded in doing (Kamau et al., 2018).  

 

The failure of Doha and the lack of specificity of SDG17 would seem, a priori, to infringe the right to development adopted in 1986 since they deny millions of people and many peoples, especially in the global South, the ability to enjoy economic development and the concomitant social, cultural and political freedoms on equal terms.  Nation states must engineer their own development in a global marketplace the rules of which are discriminatory.  Moreover, the intergovernmental organisations that have the economic power to incentivise and coerce, the IMF and World Bank in particular, continue to interpret their role as being to enforce market orientated reforms that disproportionately benefit the rich nations that largely fund and control them.  Attainment of the SDGs, and international development assistance generally, are akin to charitable giving, based on the whims of governmental or philanthropic donors. 

 

 

A true global partnership necessitates replacing charity with some form of deliberate international governance. Regardless of approach, it is important to recognise that this is not just an investment in people directly experiencing poverty, adding to their incomes and capabilities.  Rather it is an investment to sustain the globalised market economy that governments generally support, and which has delivered technological advance and benefited millions of people, albeit predominantly those living in the global North.  Inequality and poverty are inevitable biproducts of a market economy that cannot be prevented without concerted intervention.  

 

While there is much consensus about the need for global partnership and about reforms necessary to enable the SDGs to be met, there is equally agreement that they cannot be realised within the existing system of global governance.  The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, when outlining his priorities for 2022 to the UN General Assembly, opined that:

 

the global financial system is morally bankrupt.  It favours the rich and punishes the poor.  

 

There is considerable agreement about the structural reforms necessary to initiate inclusive global governance and to disrupt the cabal of governments and business interests that have largely ruled the world since 1945.  The locus of power must be returned to a strengthened United Nations, the institution closest to a global parliament, ultimately with an elected General Assembly with power to legislate in the interest of ‘we the people’ not ‘we the peoples’ (Lopez- Claros  et al., 2020).  The Bretton Woods organisations- the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the WTO - need reform since voting rights perpetuate historic power imbalances. 

 

Since 1945, the Bretton Woods organisations, and to a lesser extent the United Nations, have served the interests of the West and of the United States in particular.  Indeed, some scholars argue that the United States has used these institutions to perpetuate its hegemony, accepting and obeying rules and supporting the institutions only when it was convenient to do so (Wade 2020).  Others suggest that its influence has proved more enduring because of the restraint shown in constructing these institutions and largely abiding by their rules (Ikenberry, 2001).  Either way, reform is necessary to make real the right to development and the avoidance of poverty.

 

A global development that might make institutional change more feasible is the rise of China.  Western neorealists see China’s growing influence raising the prospect of cold or hot wars with some offering strategies to avoid them (Rudd, 2022).  However, taken at face value, something neorealists would never do, Chinese statements on development and global governance chime well with the changes necessary for the SDGs to be attained by 2030.  President’s Xi Jinping speech to the 26th Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations on 25 October 2021 is illustrative (China Daily. 2021):  

 

On development, China joins many in recognising that “it is important to resolve the problem of unbalanced and inadequate development, and make development more balanced, coordinated and inclusive”.  It acknowledges the need to “strengthen people's capacity for development” and “to create a development paradigm where its outcome benefits every person in every country more directly and fairly”.  

 

Turning to global governance, China prioritises “peaceful development and the welfare of all humanity” and speaks “to solidarity and cooperation with people around the world” and to the need to “uphold international equity and justice”.  It argues that “we should vigorously advocate peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom, which are the common values of humanity, and work together to provide the right guiding philosophy for building a better world”.  It is “resolutely opposed to hegemony and power politics” and calls for “more inclusive global governance, more effective multilateral mechanisms, and more active regional cooperation”.  It opines that “to build a community with a shared future for mankind is not to replace one system or civilization with another”.  Instead, “it is about countries with different social systems, ideologies, histories, cultures and levels of development coming together for shared interests, shared rights and shared responsibilities in global affairs, and creating the greatest synergy for building a better world”.

 

Neorealists might challenge China’s words, claiming them to be a ruse designed to build an anti-western alliance to oppose Western hegemony.  If neorealists are correct, they will also realise that it is a strategy that could well prove successful given the past failures of rich nations to respond to the needs of poorer ones and, indeed, actively to promote policies that exploit and further impoverish them.  Returning, though, to the aspirations expressed by President Xi’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly, they match exactly the principles necessary to deliver the SDGs.  Much less, and the SDGs are doomed.

 

 

With little prospect that western neorealism will retreat in the immediate future, meaning that the major engines of poverty generation will remain in place, it becomes difficult to identify credible means of achieving any of the SDG targets. 

 

China’s Global Development Initiative (GDI), proposed in 2021, to speed up implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda is a source of hope (UN, 2023).  Embedded within UN structures it prioritises eight areas including poverty alleviation, food security, vaccination, and development that is people-centred, high-quality, green and innovation driven (Ha, 2023).  Based on a model of resource pooling, it includes the creation of the Global Development and South-South Cooperation Fund and increased finance for the China-UN Peace and Development Fund.  Sixty-eight countries have joined the Group of Friends of the GDI, a significant constituency, but the funding underpinning the initiative is modest in global terms.

 

Beyond the GDI, a proposal to establish a Global Social Protection Fund (GSPF) has attracted the support of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the Global Coalition for Social Protection.  The fund, proposed by Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, would provide international financial support to bridge the gap between national resources and the cost of implementing a basic social protection floor.  It would also include a facility to insure against national crises that might cause caseloads and expenditure unexpectedly to increase (Schutter, 2021).  

 

Framed explicitly within the rubric of the SDGs, the intention is to aid developing countries simultaneously to attain Targets 1.1 (end extreme poverty), 1.3 (implement social protection) and 3.8 (achieve universal health coverage) by 2030.  Administrative responsibilities would be integrated within the ILO Global Flagship Programme on Building Social Protection Floors for All with strategic direction provided by a high-level political alliance that might be developed from USP2030, the Global Partnership for Universal Social Protection to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. 

 

The economic rationale for the Fund is essentially Keynesian: social protection provides demand-driven growth, stabilises the economy, has multiplier effects for local economies and increases income equality with associated falls in poverty.  At an individual level, the fund would enhance human capital and savings that, combined with the macro-economic benefits, would increase national resilience.  

 

Attractions of the GSPF include the focus on a practical solution to poverty and the emphasis on national ownership of the social protection policies to be implemented.  Moreover, while De Schutter is bound by his anachronistic remit to address extreme income poverty (Target 1.1 but not Target 1.2), he is likely to encourage governments to pay attention to the other (eight) dimensions in the delivery of social protection insisting, for example, that support is adequate and sustained, and that beneficiaries are empowered and not subject to maltreatment, and are helped to secure dignified work, to fulfil their social responsibilities and to enjoy their social and cultural rights.

 

Furthermore, Paragraph 13 of ILO Recommendation 202 on social protection floors anticipates that nations “progressively build and maintain comprehensive and adequate social security systems” and “provide higher levels of protection to as many people as possible”.  While it is generally true that only low-income countries would find it impossible to end extreme poverty, over 20 lower middle-income countries would have difficulty implementing a protection floor that would eradicate poverty set at the $US3.20; they would need to divert six per cent or more of their GDP with some required to devote over 16 per cent.  

 

Cheap and necessary though it is, the Global Social Protection Fund remains unfunded.  Whether poverty is expressed in terms of survival, social participation, freedom or the infringement of human rights makes little difference; history suggests that, beyond rhetoric, most leaders care little about the poverty existing outside their national borders.

 

May 30th, 2023

 

(Robert Walker is Professor Emeritus and Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; Professor at School of Sociology, Beijing Normal University)

 

 

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