Editorial Introduction: Vulnerability, Coping and Policy

Abstract

Robert Chambers¡OS fjullcq,n.vol 20 no 2. Inst tute of Des elopntent Sitahes, Sussex these flows.Indicators of poverty are then easily taken as indicators of other dimensions of deprivation.including vulnerability.But vulnerability, more than poverty, is linked with net assets.Poverty, in the sense of low income, can he reduced by borrowing and ;nvesting: hut such debt makes households more vulnerable.Poor people, in their horror of debt, appear more aware than professionals of the tradeoffs between poverty and vulnerability.Programmes and policies to reduce vulnerability -to make more secure -are not, one for one, the same as programmes and policies to reduce poverty -to raise incomes.Care is also needed because vulnerability and security start as 'our' concepts and are not necessarily 'theirs'.To correct and modify them to fit local conditions requires decentralised analysis, encouraging, permitting, and acting on local concepts and priorities, as defined by poor people themselves.To date, such analysis indicates that for them, reducing vulnerability and enhancing security are recurrent concerns.Moreover, in recent years, while conditions have improved for some people, hundreds of' millions of others have become more vulnerable: through greater exposure to physical or political disaster or threat, through higher costs of meeting contingencies such as health expenditures, or through loss of assets through individual or widespread disasters which have used up their reserves, leaving them less to cope with future needs and crises.With concerns like these a workshop on vulnerability and coping was held at IDS in September 1988, leading to this Bulletin.Some 20 people took part, about half of them reporting on recent fieldwork.The focus was at the household level, and the aims were to try to understand better the nature of vulnerability, how poor people cope with risks, shocks and stress, and what should he priorities for policy and research.Unlike poverty, vulnerability lacks a developed theory and accepted indicators and methods of measurement.The articles in this Bulletin provide ideas and material which should contribute towards developing these.Most directly, the first article, by Jeremy Swift, presents a critique of parts of Amartya Sen's entitlement theory, and then outlines a new analysis of vulnerability and security based on a classification of assets into investments, stores and claims.Investments Vulnerability 'Vulnerable' and 'vulnerability' are common terms in the lexicon of development, but their use is often vague.They serve as convenient substitutes for 'poor' and 'poverty', and allow planners and other professionals to restrain the overuse of those words.Some precision can be found in the use of 'vulnerable groups' where this refers to pregnant and lactating women, to children, or to disadvantaged communities such as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in India.More often, though, vulnerable is used simply as a synonym for poor.Vulnerability, though, is not the same as poverty.lt means not lack or want, but defencelessness.insecurity, and exposure to risk, shocks and stress.This contrast is clearer when different dimensions of deprivation are distinguished, for example, physical weakness, isolation, poverty, and powerlessness as well as vulnerability.Of these, physical weakness.isolation and poverty are quite well recognised, and many programmes seek to alleviate them: powerlessness is crucial but it is rare for direct action against it to be politically acceptable; and vulnerability has remained curiously neglected in analysis and policy.perhaps because of its confusion with poverty.Yet vulnerability, and its opposite, security, stand out as recurrent concerns of poor people which professional definitions of poverty overlook.Vulnerability here refers to exposure to contingencies and stress, and difficulty in coping with them.Vulnerability has thus two sides: an external side of risks, shocks, and stress to which an individual or household is subject; and an internal side which is defencelessness, meaning a lack of means to cope without damaging loss.Loss can take many forms becoming or being physically weaker, economically impoverished, socially dependent, humiliated or psychologically harmed.Failure to distinguish vulnerability from poverty has bad effects.It blurs distinctions and sustains stereotypes of the amorphous and undifferentiated mass of the poor.Poverty is often defined by professionals for convenience of counting, in terms of flows of income or consumption.Anti-poverty programmes are then designed to raise incomes or consumption and progress is assessed by measures of