CPRC Research themes

Exclusion from social, political and economic institutions and relations reduces a person’s prospects for escaping poverty and their ability to assert their rights. The Adverse Incorporation and Social Exclusion (AI/SE) theme explored the significance and implications of these relations for policy on chronic poverty. 

Research

CPRC research on AI/SE has focused on labour market restructuring, and shifts from ‘clientelism’ to citizenship. It has looked at the relationship between risk and vulnerability, patronage politics, and chronic poverty; and the way in which inequalities within global economic value chains maintain poverty.

AI/SE work has included research in South Africa which shows that people’s prospects are determined by the ways in which their lives are involved in networks of social and economic power. Research has also particularly looked at the long-term poverty informally employed workers face - especially in South Africa and among Indian migrant casual workers -and labour conditions that are akin to slavery.

Research has investigated social protection schemes in the Politics of What Works - which focused on the politics behind an innovative approach to development programming. Important work on the Government of chronic poverty, also published in a special edition of the Journal of Development Studies, investigated the extent to which political efforts to tackle chronic poverty might transform the citizenship rights and status of the poorest people.

Resources

AI/SE and chronic poverty

• Adverse incorporation, social exclusion and chronic poverty
  ^{CPRC Working paper 181}
  
• The politics of what works in reducing chronic poverty
  ^{CPRC Policy brief 5}
  
• In Search of South Africa's Second Economy: Chronic poverty, economic marginalisation and adverse incorporation in Mt Frere and Khayelitsha
  ^{CPRC Working paper 102}
  

Informal labour and global value chains
(view full series of Vulnerable workers in global production networks)

• The dynamics of adverse incorporation in global production networks: Poverty, vulnerability and ‘slave labour’ in Brazil
  ^{CPRC Working paper 175}
  
• Child labour in global production networks: Poverty, vulnerability and ‘adverse incorporation’ in the Delhi garments sector
  ^{CPRC Working paper 177}
  

Government of chronic poverty
(view full series of the Government of chronic poverty)

• The government of chronic poverty: from exclusion to citizenship?
  ^{CPRC Working paper 151}
  
• Governing chronic poverty under inclusive liberalism: the case of the Northern Uganda Social Action Fund
  ^{CPRC Working paper 150}
  
• Seeing like a 'PWA': a study of therapeutic citizens and welfare subjects in Cape Town, South Africa
  ^{CPRC Working paper 144}
  

View more resources on AI/SE and on labour