EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report looks at how being immersed in poverty and social exclusion for a prolonged period may affect how people consider themselves and their future, and how they act in relation to it. Understanding it is important for those who plan and implement social policies addressing poverty because it could increase the effectiveness of their work.

Tackling poverty requires improving economic conditions and ensuring real, actual access to quality education, employment, housing and health services.This is essential to break the cycle of poverty. While these issues are already covered by abundant literature and work at EU level, this report focuses on a less-studied obstacle – that is, how poverty and exclusion affect behaviour, aspirations, hope and agency, which can all be essential drivers to social mobility. Evidence suggests that the experience of poverty itself seems to contribute to the transmission of poverty to the next generation.

Social assistance measures in support of people in poverty usually consist of ’safety net’ measures allowing people to recover their strengths and ‘pull the pieces together’. They are, in most cases, conceived as temporary. The expectation is that, sooner or later, people should be able to reach economic autonomy. This report explains why this can be difficult for people who have been immersed in an environment of poverty and social exclusion for a long time. The impact of such conditions on their aspirations, self-confidence and decision-making may be a less visible but significant obstacle. Understanding such obstacle, and how to address it, may be crucial for policies to work.

Importantly, the report speaks of the effects of the experience of poverty, rather than ‘of the poor’. The findings it presents point to what may happen to any person who has to endure certain circumstances.

The report gathers and summarises findings from behavioural studies, neuroscience, sociological and economic studies. Bringing together these diverse sources and scientific evidence can help to better understand this complex issue, and to identify countermeasures that may effectively address the problem.

In this report, we look at poverty and social exclusion together, while acknowledging that the two do not always coincide. Exclusion can be triggered by discrimination on the basis of factors other than income (religion, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, etc). Similarly, poverty does not always have to be accompanied by exclusion, for example when it is a mainstream issue in a particular locality.

But in the case of marginalised groups who have been both poor and excluded for several generations, poverty and exclusion often overlap and become inextricable.

A particular interest of this report is the effects of ‘multigenerational’ poverty – that is, poverty that has affected families for several generations. In fact, the effects of poverty and exclusion are already visible when they are caused by temporary circumstances (such as migration to another country, or a change in personal situations deriving, for example, from the loss of a job). The report argues that people who are in a situation of poverty over many generations may see such effects multiplied. The impact of poverty may be enhanced by the cumulative load of environmental factors, as the absence of experiences of social mobility in the family history and the environment may increasingly undermine aspirations and affect decisions.

The implications of these findings may be particularly relevant to defining inclusion strategies for families and communities that have been marginalised for a long period of time. Their issues may or may not be linked to a situation of ethnic discrimination. The same issues may affect many Roma communities across Europe - but also families and neighbourhoods which have been in deep poverty for centuries, in deprived areas of several Member States.

The report is divided into two parts: Section I outlines what different research disciplines say about the impact of poverty and exclusion on the mindset (aspirations, decision-making, hope). Section II outlines possible solutions, as indicated by research and field experience. It contains examples of concrete initiatives that have successfully tackled some aspects of the issue.