Comparative Research Program on Poverty

THE COMPARATIVE Research Program on Poverty (CROP) is a nonprofit international nongovernmental Organization (INGO), founded in 1992 by the International Social Science Council (ISSC) in collaboration with the United Nations’ UNESCO. It is based in Norway. CROP is composed of a Secretariat and a Scientific Committee.

The Scientific Committee is the main guiding force behind CROP; its members are distinguished scholars in the field of poverty research. The funds come from multiple sources, including higher-education institutions, charitable foundations, and various United Nations agencies.

CROP is organized around an extensive international and multidisciplinary research network, which is open to all poverty researchers and others interested in a scientific approach to poverty. The General Assembly of ISSC appoints the CROP Scientific Committee to advise the program. The members of the Scientific Committee are outstanding poverty researchers representing different geographical regions and scientific disciplines worldwide.

The self-proclaimed objectives of CROP are to consider how the social sciences can better contribute to the understanding of poverty in a global context, compare the different theoretical approaches so as to understand better their links and relationships, consider how scholars working within different paradigms can develop a joint arena for multiparadigmatic poverty research, establish an international scientific network that will give impetus to a long-term research program, generate and secure high quality-data of importance for different social science approaches to the comparative study of poverty, and create a body of scientific knowledge that can be used for poverty reduction.

CROP aims to fulfill the objectives by organizing regional workshops, international conferences, and projects that serve for discussions of ideas and projects for researchers. Special emphasis is placed on projects concerning “contextual poverty,” those focusing on poverty in relation to a society's cultural, economic, and political patterns; that is, those projects that focus not only on the world of the poor, the effects of poverty, and solutions to it, but also on the causes and the role of the nonpoor in creating, sustaining, and reducing poverty.

The organization publishes books, annual reports, papers, reviews, and newsletters, which are distributed globally to the CROP researchers, academic institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and governments. Topics include poverty and indigenous people, demography of poverty, social costs of poverty, law and poverty, politics and poverty reduction, poverty and water, best practices in poverty reduction, and elite perceptions of poverty and the poor. The CROP Newsletter is published and distributed four times a year, free of charge, to all members of the CROPnet. It contains articles about poverty research, reports from workshops and conferences, information about new publications, ongoing projects, future CROP workshops, as well as book announcements.