In recognizing that poverty is 'multi-dimensional,' contemporary policy discourses – drawing on scholarship on ‘networks,’ ‘exclusion,’ and ‘culture’ – have made important (if often underappreciated) steps to incorporate insights from social and political theory, but these...

This paper examines the fracture points, or areas of weakness and failure, in social policy formation - from agenda setting through to policy formation and its legitimisation. It suggests why it is that despite clearly identified severe and widespread problems, which have been shown to drive and...

The relationships between poverty and the environment are highly contested, debated and researched. The sustainable development agenda, advocated at the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development, brings these relationships to the fore. Environmental sustainability, alongside social...

This paper examines recent contributions to the analysis of poverty, particularly those emphasising the constraints on the poor posed by social relations and institutions that systematically benefit the powerful. It proposes an analytic framework for study of the causes of poverty, responses to...

Five ideas constitute the central message of this study. First, urban rickshaw pullers come from a very poor economic background consistent with the characteristics of chronic poverty. Second, rickshaw pulling provides a route of modest upward mobility for those among the rural chronically poor...

We explore how to measure poverty over time, by focusing on trajectories of poverty rather than poverty at a particular point in time. We consider welfare outcomes over a period in time, consisting of a number of spells. We offer a characterization of desirable properties for measuring poverty...

The Stages-of-Progress methodology helps examine households' movements out of poverty and into poverty. More important, it helps uncover the reasons responsible for these movements, thereby feeding directly into policy formulation. I present the steps in this methodology, discussing briefly some...

The paradigm of ‘inclusive liberalism' that currently characterises international development places a particular emphasis on the responsibility of communities to overcome the often structural problems of poverty and exclusion. Such approaches have become increasingly controversial: on the one...

This paper examines the relation between government and poverty in Tanzania through the medium of participation. Participatory approaches are institutionalised as the way in which communities are brought into relations with the state and with national policies such as the reduction of poverty....

Conventional poverty analysis is ill-equipped to answer questions concerning the future persistence of observed poverty. Are those observed to be poor at a particular point in time chronically poor, or are they simply in a transitory state? While a number of analysts have struggled with this...