20 MIDDLE EAST REPORT 272 ■ FALL 2014 Poverty Mapping Genealogy of a Term Mona Atia A t the spring 2013 meetings, World Bank President Jim Young Kim set 2030 as the target date for eradicating extreme poverty, deined as subsistence on less than $1.25 per day, across the globe. In line with this goal, the United Nations created a New Global Partnership to lift the 1.2 billion poorest people out of penury in the same time frame. he New Global Partnership or Post-2015 Development Agenda replaces the eight Millennium Development Goals declared in 2000 and calls for a “data revolution” that demands development goals be based on internationally compatible measures. An important tool for this “data revolution” is poverty mapping—the visual depiction of income and consumption data as indicators of lagging development in particular loca- tions. Such maps are produced using aggregate statistics that rank villages and communes by these indicators and enable governments, international agencies and NGOs to channel aid “more precisely” to the poorest of the poor. he maps, in the words of World Bank proponents, attempt to “summarize poverty estimates for hundreds or even thou- sands of towns, villages or urban neighborhoods on a single page and in a visual format that is readily understandable by a wide audience.” 1 One beneit of poverty maps is to shift poverty data away from sole emphasis on the nation-state toward provincial and local variances. Poverty mapping tools have been used to guide a wide range of interventions including the location of basic infrastructure development; the creation of national, provincial and municipal development plans; the allocation of grant monies; and the piloting of conditional cash transfers to replace subsidies. History Debates about how to deine and measure poverty have been around for hundreds of years. One of the irst poverty maps was Charles Booth’s 1889 depiction of poverty in London. Based on detailed observations, Booth used seven and then eight color-coded classiications along a spectrum to describe the income and social class of indi- vidual streets in the British capital. hat kind of attention to regional and local variations did not become a ield of inquiry until the 1940s, when regional scientists attempted to explain the variables that afect the distribution of wealth across a city or municipality. In fact, regional science and the fascination with statistics led to the quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s in which the discipline of geography became oriented toward the scientiic method of inquiry and methodologically dominated by the use of statistics and mathematical modeling. Poverty maps come out of a larger trend within develop- ment that seeks “evidence-based policymaking.” Historically, discussions of poverty have been dominated by debates about how to deine and measure the “national poverty head count ratio”—the proportion of a population living below the poverty line. In the early 1990s, economists began to ponder the idea that there might be a spatial dimension to poverty—that is, that a relationship between poverty rates and speciic locations might exist. hey identiied “spatial poverty traps” where poverty tends to be concentrated and began to ponder the relationship between this phenomenon and the environments in which these subjects reside. Economists’ discovery of geography spurred a “new economic geography” in which econometric and spatial analyses were merged. At the time, geographical information science was at its infancy and subnational poverty measures were only beginning to be collected. his juncture also marked the beginning of investment in poverty mapping, with World Bank leadership, as resources were put toward assembling data and developing statistical and econometrical techniques that could construct maps of where poverty is most concentrated. he 2009 World Development Report, entitled Reshaping Economic Geography, solidiied the development industries’ commitment to geographical considerations. Poverty mapping therefore ties into broader debates about the deinition and measurement of poverty, including basic needs indexes and multidimensional poverty measurements. But the impetus for targeted programs was a neoliberal framework that left many countries in the global south, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, with rising poverty rates and dwindling public resources. he mandate to “do something with less” drove innovations in mapping methodologies, as policymakers sought to ensure Mona Atia is associate professor of geography at George Washington University.