Is it possible to measure wealth and poverty across settings while being faithful to local understandings? The stages of progress method (SoP) attempts to do this by building ladders of wealth in locally relevant terms and using these in comparisons across groups. This approach is potentially useful among pastoralist populations where monetary income and standard asset inventories may be misleading, and where people are discriminated against by the state and neglected by formal systems of accounting. On the basis of fieldwork among Nyangatom agro–pastoralists in Ethiopia, we expose some problematic assumptions of the SoP method. Participants did not endorse ladder-like stages from poverty to wealth distinguished by material assets, nor did they reach consensus on the definition of a poverty line. We caution that the SoP method carries risks of facipulation, and instead we advocate for multidimensional measures of prosperity based on locally relevant forms of wealth.

中文翻译：

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贫穷与财富没有阶梯？埃塞俄比亚下奥莫河谷农牧民进步阶段方法评估

是否有可能在忠实于当地理解的同时衡量不同环境下的财富和贫困？进步阶段法 (SoP) 试图通过以当地相关术语构建财富阶梯并在不同群体之间进行比较来实现这一目标。这种方法对牧民群体可能有用，因为在这些牧民群体中，货币收入和标准资产库存可能会产生误导，人们受到国家歧视并被正式会计系统忽视。基于对埃塞俄比亚 Nyangatom 农牧民的实地调查，我们揭示了 SoP 方法的一些有问题的假设。与会者并不认可以物质资产为标志的从贫困到富裕的阶梯式阶段，也没有就贫困线的定义达成共识。我们警告说，SoP 方法存在误导的风险，相反，我们提倡基于当地相关财富形式的多维繁荣衡量标准。