At the top of the list of Millennium Development Goals is the eradication of extreme poverty. Achievement of this goal is to be indicated, in part, by a 50 percent reduction in the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day. A recent UN report on progress towards realisation of the MDGs suggested that efforts in respect of this specific target have achieved only mixed success (United Nations 2007). While the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty may have declined, it still remains alarmingly high at an estimated one-sixth of the global total – the so-called ‘Bottom Billion’ (Collier 2007). Within the countries being studied as part of the research for Young Lives, notably Peru and Vietnam, poverty is becoming entrenched in tandem with impressive economic growth being recorded at the national level.
This paper proceeds in the conviction that poverty, in general, and childhood poverty, in particular, are the product of complex and evolving forces that, in many parts of the world, appear to be increasing in their reach and scale. Such forces are bound up with thoroughgoing processes of social change. Expanding current efforts - including the cancellation of international debt - may have some positive effects. However, in order to ensure the eradication of childhood poverty, much more than this will be needed.
The discussion presented in this Technical Note is divided into four sections. In the first I make explicit the conceptual basis for my enquiry. Attention is paid most particularly to the notion of ‘political economy’. In order to account for the approach taken this section also explains some of the limitations in recent literature on childhood poverty. Sections Two and Three explore key shifts in thinking entailed in the pursuit of understanding of the political economy of childhood poverty that is properly mindful of issues of power. The first of these two sections offers a view on how the construction of childhood as a social institution might be understood in light of the workings of political economy and how they intersect with ideology/culture. The third section reverses the perspective to explore the challenge of developing an approach to political economy that is mindful of children. The final section of the paper takes the key elements of the foregoing theoretical discussion and applies them in the articulation of an approach to exploration of childhood poverty that locates local experience in relation to global political economy. Social reproduction is the particular theme around which this aim is pursued.
At the top of the list of Millennium Development Goals is the eradication of extreme poverty. Achievement of this goal is to be indicated, in part, by a 50 percent reduction in the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day. A recent UN report on progress towards realisation of the MDGs suggested that efforts in respect of this specific target have achieved only mixed success (United Nations 2007). While the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty may have declined, it still remains alarmingly high at an estimated one-sixth of the global total – the so-called ‘Bottom Billion’ (Collier 2007). Within the countries being studied as part of the research for Young Lives, notably Peru and Vietnam, poverty is becoming entrenched in tandem with impressive economic growth being recorded at the national level.
This paper proceeds in the conviction that poverty, in general, and childhood poverty, in particular, are the product of complex and evolving forces that, in many parts of the world, appear to be increasing in their reach and scale. Such forces are bound up with thoroughgoing processes of social change. Expanding current efforts - including the cancellation of international debt - may have some positive effects. However, in order to ensure the eradication of childhood poverty, much more than this will be needed.
The discussion presented in this Technical Note is divided into four sections. In the first I make explicit the conceptual basis for my enquiry. Attention is paid most particularly to the notion of ‘political economy’. In order to account for the approach taken this section also explains some of the limitations in recent literature on childhood poverty. Sections Two and Three explore key shifts in thinking entailed in the pursuit of understanding of the political economy of childhood poverty that is properly mindful of issues of power. The first of these two sections offers a view on how the construction of childhood as a social institution might be understood in light of the workings of political economy and how they intersect with ideology/culture. The third section reverses the perspective to explore the challenge of developing an approach to political economy that is mindful of children. The final section of the paper takes the key elements of the foregoing theoretical discussion and applies them in the articulation of an approach to exploration of childhood poverty that locates local experience in relation to global political economy. Social reproduction is the particular theme around which this aim is pursued.