Rebuilding Babel: finding common development solutions using cross-contextual comparisons of multidimensional well-being

We build on the theoretical tradition of livelihood strategies and capital portfolios to empirically assess wellbeing among rural households, but with an eye to comparison across contexts. First, we estimate a multidimensional measure of poverty based on fuzzy logic, for two rural frontiers: Nang Rong, Thailand and Altamira, Brazil. To enable cross-contextual comparison, we calculate a second estimate using a subset of shared measures. We find that the pattern of response over the range of many key variables – for example education, income, and demographic dependency ratio – is robust to model specification, suggesting that comparative generalizations, useful in formulating cost-effective policy interventions across contexts, could be satisfactorily identified in many instances. More generally, our approach provides researchers and policymakers with a framework for understanding the interaction of context and the subjective construction of wellbeing that is useful for distinguishing stable corollaries of poverty from those that are volatile across contexts.