School of Geography - Theses
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ItemPrecision poverty alleviation in China dynamic interactions between local officials and poverty households( 2017)Precision Poverty Alleviation' (PPA) is the Chinese government's latest antipoverty policy, aiming to lift the remaining 70 million Chinese citizens above the poverty line by 2020. Under the PPA scheme, every poverty household is paired one-on-one with a local government official, who then bears responsibility for the eradication of their poverty circumstances. PPA mitigates a number of the shortcomings of China's past poverty alleviation policies, including government corruption, misdirection of funds, and failure to target the truly impoverished. This study examines how the pairings between local officials and poverty households operate within this poverty reduction scheme, and also explores the outcomes of these dynamic interactions for poverty reduction, based on nineteen in-depth, semistructured interviews with PPA households. Fieldwork was conducted in poverty villages in Shaanxi province, China - one of the nation's fourteen 'contiguous poverty-stricken areas', and where pro-poor tourism is operating as the primary anti-poverty strategy. Using a multidimensional index of poverty, PPA was found to be more effective when poor households are actively engaged with their poverty alleviation process, and/or when they are paired with a high-ranking local official who is able to mobilise social and financial resources. This finding has implications for making PPA more precise, and also contributes to the wider literature on poverty conceptualisation and alleviation.