Collective Action and Property Rights for Poverty Reduction: A Review of Methods and Approaches

While much attention has been given to examining various aspects of poverty, anumber of studies have shown that institutional environment in which the poorexist conditions welfare outcomes, thus highlighting the inherently crucialimportance of institutions for poverty reduction. The institutions of property rightsand collective action are among those identified as playing a major role in thelivelihood strategies of the poor. This paper highlights ways to operationalize theconceptual framework developed by Di Gregorio and colleagues (2008), whichprovides an analytical tool to study poverty through the institutional lens with aspecial focus on collective action and property rights. By emphasizing themultidimensionality of poverty, the authors advocate the importance of applyingvarious approaches and tools to conceptualizing and measuring it. They alsoemphasize the crucial role that institutions of collective action and property rightsplay in poverty reduction and sketch out theoretical nuances and methods ofexamining such institutions. In addition, power relations and political context areseen to be of outmost importance in poverty-related studies; the authors providesuggestions on how to understand and operationalize various dimensions of powerand institutional environment in research. Outcomes are approached from theevaluative standpoint, which moves beyond straightforward empirical measurementof certain indicators to a comprehensive analysis that would involve a range ofmethods and approaches to both the definition and measurement of criteria thataffect the complex reality of the poor.