From Poverty to Livelihood Vulnerability: Towards an Agenda for Universalising Socio-economic Security in Nepal

This contribution aims to examine the problems inherent in the dominant money-metric approach to poverty measurement, as a deliberate attempt to distorting and downsizing the level of human deprivation and the subsequent neo-liberal policy prescriptions of targeting. Then, under the livelihoods approach, it broadens the definition of poverty by including vulnerability and identifies the Common People of Nepal and their socio-economic profiles as an alternative analysis of human deprivation. In today’s complex society virtually everyone is prone to various socio-economic shocks which undermines livelihoods and raises vulnerability to further collapse of livelihoods, and thus aggravates poverty. This situation is most serious to the Common People, defined as a combination of the conventionally defined poor and the vulnerable who do not possess sufficient livelihood capitals. Hence, coupled with its computational problems, the intention and utilization of poverty line appears to be quite controversial and largely a meaningless exercise. Building upon the Keynesian Effective Demand and Listian Infant Industry Protection arguments, the policy implication of this study is to provide arguments in favour of universalizing socio-economic security in Nepal, rather than the narrow targeting based on the conventional poverty line approach. We argue that universal provisioning promotes livelihoods and thus help reduce both poverty and vulnerability in a sustainable manner. Indeed, such a universal approach is likely to bring about significant improvements in a number of socio-economic indicators, including political stability and social cohesion. This paper documents this process through the presentation of results of the analysis of the two Household Survey data, other latest available socio-economic indicators and state policies that bear on poverty and vulnerability in the context of Nepal. The results show that, despite its official goal of poverty alleviation, the Nepalese government seems to be too much preoccupied with neo-liberal ideology, and thus targeting the poor has been the business-as-usual of anti-poverty interventions. These findings do not augur well for poverty prevention, as an essential component of poverty alleviation. Hence, in the face of majority of the population being either poor or vulnerable, looking at poverty from the livelihood lens, universalizing socioeconomic security to all appears to be the right way towards poverty alleviation in Nepal.