The dilemma of poor people’s agency

Multidimensional poverty concepts conceptualize poverty as a combination of material and immaterial lack: a lack of material means which constitutes an important, albeit not the only cause for a lack of self-determination. At the same time, such multidimensional approaches have a strong normative impetus towards acknowledging and promoting the agency of people living in poverty. Thus, while this broader understanding of poverty has its sociological merits, it also leads to a theoretical dilemma: if the lack of self-determination is a defining dimension of poverty, can the poor have agency at all while they are living in poverty? Empirical poverty research mirrors this dilemma in that it mainly focuses on the limited choices of the poor and the detrimental effects of their choices and actions. Finally, there is no doubt that the lack of material means poses countless dilemmas in daily life for the poor, not least because choosing one course of action may jeopardize one’s welfare in other respects, e.g. risking one’s health by accepting a hazardous job (Wollf/de-Shalit 2007).

In this presentation I will analyse the agency of poor people from the theoretical perspective of the capability approach (CA). Agency as the freedom of leading one’s life according to one’s own values constitutes the empirical and normative yardstick for the CA. Moreover, the CA champions a view of human beings as “doers” and “judges” capable of having aspirations and shaping their lives, given adequate individual and social conversion factors (Bonvin/Laruffa 2018). I will discuss three theoretical issues. (1) If value-based choices are a marker of agency, how can we distinguish autonomous choices from adapted preferences stemming from habituation to poor circumstances? (2) All the different strands of the CA posit minimum standards (basic capabilities) for various material and immaterial conversion factors as conditions for genuine agency. For political and measurement purposes these standards must be the same for everyone. In contrast, in qualitative research individual cases constitute the starting point of analysis. How can we thus bring together general standards with individual ideas of ‘good enough’ living conditions expressed in qualitative interviews? (3) Agency is not a binary phenomenon but a gradual one. Referring to the debate on autonomy in feminist philosophy I propose to distinguish ranges of agency in different domains of life (Mackenzie 2014).

The presentation is based on empirical data from a qualitative long-term study of the practices of welfare production of poor households in Switzerland comprising three waves of interviews with 40 households and financial diaries over one month.

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