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Abstract
While much attention has been given to examining various aspects of poverty, a
number of studies have shown that institutional environment in which the poor
exist conditions welfare outcomes, thus highlighting the inherently crucial
importance of institutions for poverty reduction. The institutions of property rights
and collective action are among those identified as playing a major role in the
livelihood strategies of the poor. This paper highlights ways to operationalize the
conceptual framework developed by Di Gregorio and colleagues (2008), which
provides an analytical tool to study poverty through the institutional lens with a
special focus on collective action and property rights. By emphasizing the
multidimensionality of poverty, the authors advocate the importance of applying
various approaches and tools to conceptualizing and measuring it. They also
emphasize the crucial role that institutions of collective action and property rights
play in poverty reduction and sketch out theoretical nuances and methods of
examining such institutions. In addition, power relations and political context are
seen to be of outmost importance in poverty-related studies; the authors provide
suggestions on how to understand and operationalize various dimensions of power
and institutional environment in research. Outcomes are approached from the
evaluative standpoint, which moves beyond straightforward empirical measurement
of certain indicators to a comprehensive analysis that would involve a range of
methods and approaches to both the definition and measurement of criteria that
affect the complex reality of the poor.