The Intellectual Architecture of Poverty Scholarship, 1923–2023

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  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Development & Organizations

Abstract

This paper maps the intellectual architecture of poverty scholarship over the past century. Drawing on a corpus of 9,660 peer-reviewed articles published between 1923 and 2023, it examines how the field has expanded and whether that expansion transformed its conceptual, methodological, and policy foundations. Rather than treating poverty research as a transparent reflection of social conditions, the study analyzes it as a structured domain of knowledge production that shapes how poverty is rendered legible and governable. The growth trajectory is discontinuous. Poverty research remains sparse through the mid-twentieth century, consolidates in the 1970s and 1980s, and undergoes rapid institutional expansion beginning in the mid-1990s. Since that inflection point, annual publication volume has increased more than fivefold, producing a dense and stratified knowledge system. Despite this dramatic scaling, the field’s underlying architecture shows striking continuity. Structural framings form the backbone of poverty scholarship across decades, while multidimensional approaches expand without displacing structural accounts. Behavioral explanations remain marginal. Methodologically, the field shifts from early qualitative dominance to mid-century parity and ultimately to quantitative consolidation. In the 2010s and 2020s, quantitative research commands both numerical and citation-weighted dominance, shaping the hierarchy of evidence. Policy orientations reveal similar stability. Targeting and means testing emerge early and remain the dominant intervention logic across framings, methods, and substantive domains. Redistribution and community empowerment persist as secondary alternatives, while universal provision and rights-based reform remain peripheral. The findings suggest that poverty scholarship has expanded enormously in scale while preserving a stable governance logic that links structural diagnosis to statistical authority and targeted intervention.

Author

• Rahardhika Utama