Social exclusion, poverty and discrimination: towards an analytical framework

摘要

The concept of social exclusion has emerged relatively recently in discussions about poverty, inequality and justice in the context of social and economic changes in the North. Since the Social Summit, there has been increasing attention paid to thepossible relevance of the concept to social policy analysis in developing countries (IILS 1997; IDS 1998). However, the transferability of the concept is not at all clear. In fact, the danger is that, given the roots of the concept in northern social policy discourse, it will simply serve to relabel long-standing and locally developed approaches to social problems or, alternatively, that it will promote a tendency to assess southern realities in terms of the extent to which they converge, or diverge, from some 'standard' northern model. Consequently, as De Haan and Maxwell (1998) suggest, a key question that has to be answered before incorporating 'social exclusion' into the development lexicon is: what is the value added? Would it add to our understanding of poverty, given that poverty is now recognised to be multidimensional? How useful is the concept where poverty is a mass phenomenon rather than the characteristic of a small 'underclass' (Gore 1994)? If poverty implies a concern with ensuring thesatisfaction of basic needs, is not a focus on poverty sufficient to ensure a concern with justice? And finally, are all forms of exclusion necessarily 'bad' and all forms of inclusion necessarily 'good'?