Absolute Poverty in Europe

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Hidden Phenomenon

Gaisbauer, Helmut, Schweiger, Gottfried

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781447341314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Pauvreté en sociologie

The COVID 19 pandemic is mainly perceived as a health problem which makes no distinction between poor and rich, powerful and powerless. Nevertheless social factors play an important role in how the pandemic affects poor and vulnerable people. This book presents the first discussion of the social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic from a social justice perspective. It offers different perspectives on the likely impact of the pandemic, the measures to contain it and the resulting consequences for vulnerable people.

1

Absolute poverty in Europe: introduction

Helmut P. Gaisbauer, Gottfried Schweiger and
Clemens Sedmak

Goal 1 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), the successor of the controversial Millennium Development Goals (MDG), is to end poverty in all its forms everywhere.¹ That formulation is certainly progress over past political agendas and the MDGs because it acknowledges that poverty in all its forms and wherever it is to be found poses a huge social, cultural, political and economic challenge (Fukuda-Parr 2016; Schweiger 2016). It also moves on from a focus on poverty in developing countries and is truly global in its perspective, including Europe as a whole as well as the richest European countries such as Germany, France, the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands. Furthermore, the SDG leave room for debates about the methods and concepts in poverty research, which are needed to grasp poverty in all its forms, and explicitly acknowledges that poverty is multidimensional and to be found in different forms and manifestations.

Poverty in Europe is a fact – and it is worth acknowledging that fact because those living in poverty are suffering from several hardships and because poverty is not inevitable: it is socially produced and could be ended by social means. That is another important key message of the SDG and the goal to end all poverty everywhere. It is a goal because it is achievable, even more so in Europe and within its rich, highly developed countries – although it is a challenge even there. The reality of poverty in Europe is researched on numerous levels, from small case studies to large-scale surveys like the EU-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC).² According to that valuable tool almost 87 million people were at risk of poverty in 2016, which means that they were living in a household having less than 60% of the equalised median income in their respective countries; 38 million people were living in conditions of material deprivation, lacking four or more of nine essential goods and services. According to both measures, young people and children were more often affected by poverty than other age groups.

This book is concerned with a set of phenomena and forms of poverty in Europe which are challenging in numerous ways. They are challenging because they are of high social and political (and not to forget moral) urgency, because those who live in such poverty are severely harmed and their situation is precarious. We use the umbrella term ‘absolute poverty’ to capture these phenomena. Are those 87 million people who are at risk of poverty to be viewed as the absolute poor? Are those who are materially deprived, or only those who are severely materially deprived? These questions could provide an interesting starting point for a discussion on absolute poverty in Europe, and some chapters in this book engage with such questions. To be clear, though, our starting points were different. And it is from them that the chapters collected here emerged. First, what we have in mind regarding absolute poverty is present in our daily lives. There is the beggar on the street, sitting there on the way to our offices day after day, even on Saturday or Sunday, and most people pass by without noticing. Secondly, we were more than once confronted with students who were doubtful that ‘real’ poverty exists in Europe, or in Austria in particular. For many of them, they read how poverty is measured by EU-SILC and other official statistics and they believe poverty is not a real concern, that lacking a few goods or having a bit less money is not a problem. Such an opinion is also widespread in society, as we notice from following poverty debates in online newspapers. But there are, as this book and other research shows, people who are much worse off and who are buried deep in the official statistics or missing altogether. There is a paradox of visibility with, on the one hand, socially hidden poverty that is represented in official statistics and, on the other, visible poverty on the streets that is invisible in the statistics. One might speak of different poverties in order not to play one off against the other (Gaisbauer and Kapferer, 2016). Thirdly, some phenomena just do not sit well in traditional concepts of poverty used to measure and research it in Europe: the illegal migrants harvesting oranges in southern Italy or working in the Spanish hothouse industry under conditions that are truly inhumane, without any rights and with seemingly no one caring (Martinez Veiga, 2013); the hidden hunger and the rise of food charity (Riches and Silvasti, 2014); the hopelessness and humiliation of the older unemployed, who are treated as waste (Bauman, 2005). We came to the conclusion that absolute poverty could be a promising framework to understand these and other forms of poverty. Fourthly, we come from a political perspective. Poverty research is not done for the researchers but for the poor. And politics as well as the public – for different reasons – seem ignorant of many of the most urgent issues that the poor face; they have resentments against certain groups of poor people like migrants or ethnic groups, or they are in denial about severe poverty. It is also from that perspective that we wanted to shed light on certain phenomena. Examples of such absolute poverty that come to mind are people living on the streets or in simple shacks, suffering from hunger, or lacking essential goods like clothing and access to services like health care. Such images of people living in absolute poverty in the midst of rich Europe, in the midst of their well-off fellow citizens who seem to lack nothing, are powerful and helpful but they need to be scrutinised in more systematic ways. That is one important aim of poverty research in general and of this book in particular.

Finally, we believe that focusing on absolute poverty in Europe, instead of on relative poverty, and also shifting the conceptual language in this regard, is important because it challenges what can be called the ‘relative poverty paradigm’ which has emerged as the dominant one in Europe over the past decades. What we mean by this ‘relative poverty paradigm’ refers to three fields. The first is the academic field, where we believe that relative poverty measures and concepts have emerged as the dominant ones when researchers analyse and study poverty in Europe, especially in its richest countries and in the EU as a whole. The second is the political field, where we believe that relative poverty measures are regarded as the most important ones by politicians and policy makers. Lastly the public field, where we believe that the discourse about poverty is dominated by the perception that poverty in Europe is always relative. All three fields are interrelated and now support each other, but the origins of the ‘relative poverty paradigm’ lie in academic debates and the highly successful and admirable work of Peter Townsend (1979) and others that spread from there into the political and public field. It was here that the move from absolute to relative understanding of poverty was initiated and substantiated.³ Nowadays this is heavily supported by the institutionalisation of the ‘relative poverty paradigm’ in official measures and statistics, which provide other researchers with data and the politicians as well as the public with knowledge about poverty in Europe and its various countries.

Our aim is not to question that ‘relative poverty paradigm’ in principle but rather to provide a starting point for a discussion about how it can or should be complemented to come to a better and more adequate understanding of poverty in Europe. This paradigm has a lot of merits and good arguments on its side but, as we also believe, this volume can show that the paradigm does not tell the whole story of poverty. Also it can, because it tends to be hegemonic, cloud the view on certain poverty phenomena in Europe, phenomena that should be taken seriously in both research and politics.

We also need to say something about Europe here. Europe can have at least three different although overlapping meanings. Europe describes a geographical area (whose borders are disputed). Europe describes a political territory, made up by European countries (some of them are also part of other geographical areas like Russia or Turkey). Europe describes a cultural space, forged by a more or less common cultural (and religious) heritage that shapes practices, values and norms to the present time. Some identify Europe with the European Union, which relies on all of those three understandings to justify itself and to institutionalise its legal, political and economic integration. This book is about absolute poverty in Europe and it refers in particular to Europe as a geographical and political entity. It does not cover, though, all European countries separately but focuses in particular on countries in Western Europe, which are among the richest. And here enters a fourth understanding of Europe, which is related to the others. Europe is a social-spatial entity with a symbolic meaning: it is rich, highly developed, powerful, cultivated, peaceful, capitalistic but also welfare oriented. Some of these meanings are rather new (like peaceful) others (like its welfare) are under pressure. Nonetheless, it seems to us that there appears to be a tension in discussing Europe together with absolute poverty, a belief that absolute poverty does not belong to Europe (or that absolute poverty contradicts in a certain sense European self-understanding). Certainly, that is a picture painted with a broad brush.

In this introduction we will examine three challenges – methods, concepts, politics – that can help to grasp what could be meant by absolute poverty in Europe and why it is something that deserves attention from politics as well as from research. Certainly, those not absolutely poor but ‘only’ poor also deserve attention and support. Their poverty needs to end as well, as the SDG rightly point out. However, as we believe becomes clearer throughout this book, certain groups within the large, far too large, population of the poor deserve particular attention. This is not to take attention away from poverty but to showcase that research and policies should not forget about them and their problems. In the course of this introduction, we will also provide glimpses into the chapters of this volume and how they connect to this framework and the challenges we present. We will not be able, though, to streamline the chapters neatly into one conceptual, methodological, political or ethical framework. That was not the intention of this book. Rather the chapters provide insights into the challenges which poverty research faces and windows into the reality of absolute poverty in Europe – a reality that is sometimes too diverse to be forced into well-ordered and closed concepts. We believe such untidiness is as productive as it can be uncomfortable because it challenges us in many ways. That is, as we will reflect upon in more detail in the conclusion of this book, one key lesson that we have learned over the past few years in editing this book and engaging with its topics, a lesson that should not be dismissed too easily by falling back into the comfort zone of abstract and empty conceptual clarity.

Challenges: methods, concepts, politics

The first challenge is that of adequate methods. Poverty research does not lack methods. To use a distinction by David Hulme (2004), poverty researchers think big and small. They use large-scale statistical methods and small-scale qualitative methods. They produce knowledge about poverty that aims to capture the livelihood of billions and knowledge that gives viable insights about the livelihoods of a few single persons or a family. It goes without saying that different methods produce different kinds of knowledge about poverty, and it depends on the questions one wants to be answered, which one is adequate; but to decide which method and which question is as controversial and difficult as it is to come up with an adequate concept of poverty. That is an issue throughout this book and the chapters in it employ different methods and argue for different approaches to poverty measurement. Is absolute poverty best researched by household panels such as the EU-SILC or by employing qualitative methods? As the chapters by Jonathan Bradshaw and Oleksandr Movshuk and by Ides Nicaise, Ingrid Schockaert and Tuba Bircan explore, it is difficult to locate absolute poverty in the existing EU-SILC because of what and who it includes in its measures. The most vulnerable groups of the European population, like homeless people, asylum seekers or undocumented migrants, are not visible in the available data and its focus on income and a shortlist of goods and services can be questioned. Still, as both Bradshaw/Movshuk and Nicaise and colleagues argue, the EU-SILC is valuable because it exists, and can be utilised to some extent to gather information about the poorest, and because such knowledge is valuable for policy makers and researchers alike.

This provides two options to capture what absolute poverty in Europe could mean: firstly, those people who are the worst-off measured by available tools such as EU-SILC and who are on the bottom of the income or deprivation scale it employs. Alternatively, absolute poverty that is particularly concerned with those who lack visibility altogether in the important tools of poverty measurement currently available, like the EU-SILC, a measure that is specifically designed to track progress in the eradication of poverty. Arguments can be made for both options, and they certainly do not exclude each other. Often different sources and methods need to complement each other, as in Chapter Seven by Patricia Kennedy and Nessa Winston, who are concerned with the lack of knowledge provided by EU-SILC on the issue of housing and the situation of the poorest in that regard. They explore a case study on the Roma in Ireland to fill this gap. That is also one insight from Chapter Eight by Rebecca O’Connell and Julia Brannen, who explore food poverty and insecurity and argue that mixed methods are urgently needed to produce better insights. Other chapters, like Chapter Fifteen by Guillem Fernàndez Evangelista on ‘Penalising homelessness in Europe’ or Chapter Nine by Carlos Pitillas on the transmission of violence in the context of urban poverty, explore issues that are outside of existing panel surveys altogether because they are concerned with marginalised groups (the Roma, traveller communities, the homeless) and specific problems, which are outside mainstream poverty research. That is also the argument of Lena Dominelli, who in Chapter Two explores existential poverty through the narratives of people on the margins as an alternative to poverty measures based on income or goods.

The lack of inclusion in existing surveys and the exploration of how methods can complement each other to produce the intended knowledge about absolute poverty in Europe are important methodological challenges, but they are not the only ones. At least two more are prevailing. On the one hand much poverty research reports the challenge to reach and conduct studies with certain vulnerable and marginalised groups (Williams, 2010). The chapters in this book suggest similar approaches. Some groups, like undocumented migrants, have reasonable fears of exposure and are anxious about cooperation. Other groups have reasonable fears of being framed and stigmatised as poor and of the shame that comes with it – something most people living in poverty are eager to escape. Here again some methods are better equipped for certain tasks and questions than others. On the other hand, doing research with poor people itself is not free of problems. That involves ethical issues, for example issues of power, epistemic injustices or exploitation for the benefit of the researcher or issues of protecting vulnerable groups (Cloke et al, 2000; Sime, 2008). Research can be empowering for the poor, and gives them the voice and visibility they lack (Lister, 2004). But obviously taking part in a survey as one of countless others is a different experience from being given the opportunity to share and narrate one’s life story. The problems of participatory research come into play here (Chambers, 2008).

The second challenge is that of finding an adequate concept of absolute poverty. Conceptual issues are, like methodological ones, part of poverty research from its beginning. What is poverty, what is absolute poverty? It is safe to bet that the final word will never be spoken on this question but that it will remain a contested issue. Our decision to employ the notion of absolute poverty and to build a book around it was partially born out of such controversies about concepts and their political framing. The distinction between relative and absolute poverty, and the discussions about the adequacy of the terminology and further implications to opt for one or the other provided one starting point here.

On the one hand relativity and absoluteness point in different directions. Absoluteness seems to be concerned with matters of absolute and universal importance such as basic needs or goods. This refers to what humans need to survive and thrive and which can be found in all human societies across the globe. That seems to be the point made by Amartya Sen (1985), and Robert Walker in Chapter Five on shame and poverty follows this path. He argues that shame is of such absolute value and of absolute reach across all national and cultural boundaries that it truly reflects the core of poverty. Relativity, so the story goes, is always concerned with varying contexts and situations. The context changes and the content of poverty changes. Obviously most research on poverty in Europe is relative in that respect, and also many chapters in this book rely on measures and concepts construed in the wake of Peter Townsend’s (1979) classical relative approach to poverty. They locate absolute poverty in the domain of extreme relative poverty. They are interested in deep, chronic or persistent relative poverty. Still, and that is the challenge we are ...