Abstract

The way poverty is understood has substantive implications for how it is analyzed, and measured, and for the kinds of policies formulated to address it. There are two dominant ways of understanding poverty: either as a lack of a certain level of income or as a deprivation in basic human needs. This dissertation examines these two conceptions and finds them wanting as a basis or framework for addressing the problem of poverty. This dissertation then proposes and argues for an alternative conception of poverty: as deprivation or failure in basic capabilities to function in elementary human ways. This conception of poverty is based primarily on Amartya Sen's notion of functionings and capabilities. ;The fundamental failure of the economic conception of poverty is that it does not capture the multidimensional character of poverty. It focuses on one part of the phenomenon and mistakes it for the whole. It sees poverty as primarily the lack of a particular level of income and employs only income and money-metric indicators to identify and measure the phenomenon. This approach can only tell us about income-deprivation and it can only result in policies that are limited, narrow and at times, irrelevant. ;The basic needs approach, on the other hand, is a richer basis for analyzing poverty, for understanding its causes and the situation of the poor, and for formulating policies that aim to alleviate poverty. However, this conception of poverty lacks the theoretical resources for making normative conclusions based on the idea of basic human needs, and as a result, it encounters some difficulties at the level of practice. ;This dissertation gives a two-pronged argument in defense of the basic capabilities conception of poverty. First, the understanding of poverty as deprivation in basic capabilities avoids the conceptual and practical shortcomings of the above two approaches. Second, it is a conception of poverty that can explain and justify why poverty is a bad thing and why we have obligations, based on justice, to alleviate and prevent poverty, not only towards the poor who live within our own political borders but towards all the impoverished people in the world