Incorporating Environmental and Natural Resources within Analyses of Multidimensional Poverty

How can multidimensional poverty measures – that currently encompass social and economic dimensions – be extended to include environmental deprivations that strike the poor simultaneously? And can such extended measures better inform effective and integrated policy responses? Research on joint Environmental and Natural Resources (ENR) and poverty issues is rich, and has contributed to bringing the poverty-environment nexus to the fore. Yet, no widely used multidimensional poverty measure identifies who and how the socio-economically poor people are affected by ENR-issues, at a large enough scale, and in ways that can respond to and inform public policies over the medium term. This paper sets out how such a measure could be built. In particular, it sets out how to include indicators of ENR deprivations into the profile of the joint deprivations people experience. These deprivation profiles could then be used to compute multidimensional measures using the Alkire Foster (AF) methodology, with the difference that these would now encompass a subset of pertinent ENR deprivations. The paper clarifies the ENR data requirements for developing and analysing such a measure empirically. 

Citation: Thiry, G., Alkire, S. and Schleicher, J. (2018). ‘Incorporating environmental and natural resources within analyses of multidimensional poverty'. OPHI Research in Progress 50a, University of Oxford.