The issues involved in poverty, inequality and social justice are many and varied, from basic access to education and healthcare, to the financial crisis and resulting austerity, and now COVID-19. Addressing Goal 1: No Poverty, Goal 5: Gender Equality, Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities and Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, our list both presents research on these topics and tackles emerging problems. A key series in the area is the SSSP Agendas for Social Justice.
This focus has always been at the heart of our publishing with the view to making the research in this area as visible and accessible as possible in order to maximise its potential impact.
Bristol University Press and Policy Press are signed up to the UN SDG Publishers Compact. In Poverty, inequality and social justice, we aim to address the following goals:
Poverty, Inequality and Social Justice
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Background:
The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa and across the globe posed special challenges and implications for low-income families with children. In this study we explored the experiences of primary caregivers of children receiving a South African social assistance programme, the Child Support Grant (CSG), during lockdown in Cape Town, South Africa, and sought to understand whether and to what extent the underlying logic of cash transfers such as the CSG speaks to the pitfalls of the social protection paradigm and the potential for moving closer to a transformative social policy approach.
Methods:
We conducted 26 telephonic qualitative interviews with primary caregivers of recipients of South Africa’s CSG that were part of a longitudinal cohort study assessing the impact of the CSG on child nutritional status and food security.
Results:
Even though primary caregivers of the CSG and their children and households were already living in precarity before the pandemic, COVID-19, and particularly the hard lockdown, worsened their social, economic and living conditions, especially as regards hunger and food insecurity.
Conclusion:
Low-income women bore the brunt of the pandemic in their roles as mothers, providers and homemakers. The pandemic has highlighted the inadequacies of the social protection paradigm that underlies the design of cash transfers such as the CSG, which has a narrowed focus on chronic poverty and vulnerability. It has also highlighted opportunities to shift to a transformative social policy framework that incorporates production, redistribution, social cohesion, adequacy and protection.
The Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) model is currently being employed in Uganda for deepening financial inclusion and poverty reduction. Despite its focus on women’s empowerment, concerns have arisen of an under-representation of women on VSLA leadership committees. Human rights-based, economic, and social justice arguments support active participation of women on VSLA leadership committees. The study sought to identify, explicate and characterise the barriers and facilitators to women in VSLA leadership. An exploratory study design using qualitative methods was selected to address the research objectives. Forty-nine focus group discussions were undertaken, featuring both VSLA members and non-members. VSLAs for inclusion in the study were randomly selected from within four regions of Uganda, stratified by: mature (>2 years old) versus new (<2 years old). The study exposed a diverse array of barriers and facilitators to women in VSLA leadership positions, revealing the influence of individual, material, institutional and social factors, in addition to social norms and gender characteristics, on women in VSLA leadership. The findings revealed that the design of interventions to achieve fair representation of women in leadership positions should be informed by an understanding of the different types, relative strengths, support for/against, and intersectionality of the factors impacting women in VSLA leadership.
The study analyses the household food security situation in Libokemkem woreda of the Amhara region in Ethiopia using 285 randomly selected sample households. The Household Calorie Acquisition (HCA) is used to measure the diet quantity aspect of food insecurity, and 225 kg/year/AE is used as a food security threshold. The Household Diet Diversity Score (HHDDS) is used to measure the diet quality aspect of food insecurity, and consuming four food groups is used as a food security line. Approximately 83 per cent of the total households achieved minimum food security status in terms of diet quantity, and 64 per cent were food secure in terms of diet quality. Determinants of food security in terms of diet quantity and quality were analysed using Tobit and logit regression models, respectively. Sex, family size, farm size, number of oxen, expenditure on agricultural technology, agroecology zone and distance from market centre are statistically significant determinants of food security in terms of diet quantity. On the other hand, sex, education status, off-farming activities, livestock ownership and agroecology zone are statistically significant determinants of food security in terms of diet quality or diversity. The study suggested the urgency of human capital development, increasing the production and productivity of major cereal crops, and promoting labour-intensive rural employment opportunities to break the vicious circle of poverty and food insecurity. It also suggested the promotion of soil and water conservation, livestock rearing and the use of organic fertiliser in highland areas, while mechanised farming for major crops such as rice, onion, chickpea, tomato and garlic is recommended for midland areas.
This work adopts different approaches to analyse situations of poverty and extreme poverty in Spain during the last decade, considering different monetary thresholds, measures of severe material deprivation and the combination of both. The determining factors of these situations and the patterns that act as a link between extreme poverty and homelessness are also examined. The results of the study show that for the most restrictive thresholds of 10 per cent and 20 per cent of the median equivalised disposable income the smallest variations during the series are observed, confirming that situations of such deep poverty are not influenced by the cycle since they do not respond to economic stimuli. The determinants of extreme poverty suggest that public policies should be target towards high-risk groups, such as single person households, households with children, younger individuals, individuals with a low educational attainment, and of foreign nationality. Finally, an interesting result is that the profile of individuals in situations of consistent poverty have the greatest similarities to the group of people experiencing homelessness.
The benefit cap and the two-child limit were both introduced with the aim of promoting fairness. However, women are disproportionately affected by both of these polices. This article presents new empirical evidence that demonstrates the gendered impacts of the benefit cap and the two-child limit on mothers. It shows that the benefit cap and the two-child limit ignore the gendered reasons for women’s disproportionate subjection to the policies, devalue unpaid care, fail to recognise gendered barriers to paid work and ultimately, harm women in a wide range of ways, particularly by further entrenching them in poverty.
The city of Bristol, UK, set out to pursue a just transition to climate change in 2020. This paper explores what happened next. We set out to study how just transition is unfolding politically on the ground, focusing on procedural justice. Over the course of a year, we conducted interviews and observations to study decision making at three levels – public sector, private sector and civil society. We found that not only is it difficult to define what just transition means, even for experts, but that the process of deciding how to pursue such a transition is highly exclusionary, especially to women and ethnic minorities. We therefore argue there is an urgency to revise decision-making procedures and ensure that there is ample opportunity to feed into decision-making processes by those who are typically excluded. Inclusive decision making must be embedded into the process of just transition from the beginning and throughout its implementation – it is not a step that can be ‘ticked off’ and then abandoned, but rather an ongoing process that must be consistently returned to. Finally, we conclude that cities have the unique opportunity to pilot bottom-up participatory approaches and to feed into the process of how a just transition might be pursued at the global level – for example, through their participation in the United Nations Framework for the Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) processes.
‘Destitution’ has re-entered the lexicon of UK social policy in the 2010s, highlighted by the rapid growth of food banks and rough sleeping in a context of controversial welfare reforms and austerity policies, yet theoretical literature on this remains limited. Specialist surveys have been developed to measure and profile these phenomena, but these remain separate from the mainstream statistical approach to poverty, which relies heavily on large-scale household surveys. Evidence from recent work in this area, including qualitative evidence, is very suggestive of risk and driving factors, but it is difficult to weigh the relative importance of different factors or to predict the effects of policy measures. A composite survey approach is developed, linking a specialised survey targeting households at risk of destitution with a major national household panel dataset, to enable predictive models to be fitted to data including significant representation of hard-to-reach and non-household populations. Models predicting destitution and food bank usage are developed and compared, highlighting the roles of key factors. Vignettes are used to show how the risks vary dramatically between households in different situations. The potential role of such models in micro-simulation or prediction of impacts of different scenarios is discussed.
We examine how children’s centres in a major city in England responded to food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic by helping to run ‘FOOD Clubs’ to support families. Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with children’s centre staff, we analyse how clubs were organised, why people joined them, and the range of benefits parents derived from them. We extend the literature on food insecurity which focuses heavily on the rise of foodbanks. Our data also informs broader policy debates around supporting parents in poverty, effective early years provision and the challenges facing families experiencing food insecurity.
The attributional process, defined as the process of inferring the causes of the events that surround individuals in their daily lives, can potentially shape the understanding of poverty and wealth. For instance, it might influence how people behave, what they expect from poor and wealthy groups in their society, and how they judge them. However, the existing measures that capture these attributional phenomena have several limitations. Some attributional factors lack empirical support, or some implemented items lack relevance in contemporary society. Therefore, the present study is aimed to deepen the understanding of the attributional process by reviewing the factor structure of the poverty () and wealth attribution scales (), as well as adapting and verifying the validity of these scales among the Mexican population. To do so, we revised the factor structure of the poverty and wealth attribution scales to create a unified scale. We back-translated the original items, conducted exploratory and confirmatory analyses, restructured the scale’s factors, and related them with other covariates. Our results indicate that these scales uniquely differentiate between internal and external attributions, demonstrating that the new factor structure is better for measuring attributional processes regarding the perceived causes of poverty and wealth than those used in previous research.
Advocacy coalitions have played an increasingly critical role in evidence-based policy development. Despite this, little is known about how such coalitions leverage research to influence policy. Addressing this gap, this qualitative study explores how a multi-sectoral advocacy coalition seeks to shape Canadian food security policy through ‘solutions-focused advocacy’. We explore four of the coalition’s strategies: (1) shaping policymakers’ thinking and priorities while responding to governments’ needs; (2) utilising research to help governments achieve political ‘wins’ while advancing the cause; (3) using research to broker relationships between ‘community’, government, and the coalition; and (4) mobilising research to ‘bring the sector along’.
