Towards Wellbeing in Forest Communities: A Source Book for Local Government

Concepts: Poverty and wellbeing have many dimensions

Box 1. Who is officially poor?

There are different approaches to officially determine poverty in a population and define who is poor. One way is to draw a poverty line. Poverty lines are often placed at the minimum level of consumption necessary to fulfil basic physical needs. Individuals below that line are considered poor. Most countries have their own definition of such a poverty line and poverty therefore is very different between countries. In order to allow cross-country comparisons, the UN and the World Bank use a number of global indices:

The World Bank and the UN define extreme poverty as having an income of less than US$ 1 per day in purchasing power parity.
The Human Development Index (HDI) of UNDP measures three fields: longevity, knowledge and decent standard of living. Longevity is measured by the percentage of people who die before age 40; knowledge is measured by adult literacy combined with the gross enrolment ratio for primary, secondary and tertiary schools; and standard of living is measured by real GDP per capita.
UNDP’s Human Poverty Index (HPI1) uses the same fields, but measures standards of living in terms of access to safe water and healthcare, and by the percentage of underweight children younger than 5 years old.

Poverty is a lack of various things. It may mean a lack of sufficient income to meet household needs or shortage of assets to provide stability or cope with changes such as the loss of a job, illness or other crises. It may mean that other basic needs, such as health, education or housing, are inadequate. But poverty is also subjective, and may be caused by feelings, such as deprivation, vulnerability, exclusion, shame or pain. A person can feel poor if her wellbeing declines, or if she compares herself to others who are better off.

Poverty is most severe when one not only feels poor, but also lacks the means to get out of poverty. Poverty is not only ‘having no fish’, it is also ‘not knowing how to fish’, ‘not knowing where to fish’, ‘not having a net’ or ‘lacking the right to fish’. In addition, often there simply are no fish, because the pond has dried up, or has been polluted. For many poor people, capabilities, opportunities or the freedom to escape poverty do not exist: they are trapped in poverty.

To capture all these facets of poverty and wellbeing, a multidimensional concept is necessary. One approach is the Nested Spheres of Poverty (NESP) model (Gönner et al. 2007). In the NESP model, poverty and wellbeing are constituted by different spheres, or aspects of daily life. The central sphere of the model is subjective wellbeing. The core spheres that influence this subjective wellbeing are health, wealth and knowledge. These—and therefore indirectly also subjective wellbeing—are influenced by context spheres. By these we mean nature, economic, social and political aspects of life that directly or indirectly influence the core spheres. The context spheres, in turn, are influenced by infrastructure and services.

Figure 3. Nested spheres of poverty (NESP).

Graphically the NESP idea can be represented as a series of concentric circles (see Figure 3). The centre is formed by subjective wellbeing (SWB), surrounded by core aspects of poverty, including basic needs, and the context that enables the poor to escape from poverty.

Subjective wellbeing is highly individual and emotional. It does not have a constant value, but varies with moods and circumstances. People compare their standard of living with that of others or with their own prior wellbeing. Personal feelings of happiness, safety, inclusion and contentedness also contribute to the overall subjective wellbeing. It also includes other forms of wellbeing like bodily wellbeing, social wellbeing, having self respect or feeling safe and secure.

The core of the model includes ‘basic needs’, such as food, health, housing and education. It also comprises general individual capabilities (i.e. skills and physical condition) to get out of poverty. In the NESP model, basic needs and individual capabilities are aggregated into three categories: health, adequate wealth and knowledge (both formal and informal or traditional). The core is also what most local people in the Indonesia study expressed as the principal aspects of poverty. Together with subjective wellbeing, it is a good measure of the poverty or wellbeing of a household.

Of the five context spheres, the natural sphere reflects availability and quality of natural resources. The economic sphere includes economic opportunities and safety nets. Aspects like social capital and cohesion, but also trust and conflicts make up the social sphere. The political sphere comprises rights and participation or representation in decision making, empowerment and freedom. The outer layer of the NESP model is the fifth context sphere, which influences the other four context spheres: infrastructure and services. These are mostly provided by government agencies, NGOs, development projects and the private sector. The context is the enabling environment for supporting self-driven attempts to escape poverty and to reduce the vulnerability of falling into poverty or getting chronically trapped in poverty.

The dynamics and causality of poverty is reflected by the different layers of the NESP model. Subjective wellbeing has a very momentary nature. It often fluctuates due to many influences. But subjective wellbeing is also correlated with the combined core aspects. Hence, improvement of core wellbeing generally leads to improved subjective wellbeing. By the same token, low wellbeing in the core usually means low subjective wellbeing.

On a longer time scale, both core wellbeing and subjective wellbeing are influenced by the context. For instance, knowledge increases as a result of improved education, health problems increase because of environmental pollution, subjective wellbeing declines due to social conflict. Hence, there is a strong causal link from the outside towards the centre.

The categories presented in the NESP model are intentionally comprehensive. They comprise basic needs as well as the condition of the enabling environment. For any given setting, a local government may wish to define the spheres and their indicators according to their own priorities. The second tool presented in this source book is a practical application of the NESP model. It shows how to develop locally relevant indicators and how to visualise the condition of each wellbeing sphere, using simple colour codes. It also allows one to assess trade offs between improving one sphere (e.g. economic sphere) at the expense of another sphere (e.g. natural sphere).

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