Snakes and Ladders, Buffers and Passports: Rethinking Poverty, Vulnerability and Wellbeing

Much research to date has tended to view vulnerability by discipline or sector, yet individuals and households experience multiple, interacting and sometimes compound vulnerabilities. Cross-disciplinary thinking is emerging as multi-dimensional vulnerability is likely to become an increasingly important concept if the outlook over the next 15 to 25 years is one of multiple, interacting and compound stressors and crises, a result of the ?perfect-storm? or ?long-crisis? thesis of the interaction of demographics, climate change and food and energy prices. A realigned analytical lens is thus useful to bring together the various intellectual strands involved in multi-dimensional vulnerability analysis. In light of the above, this paper reviews the literature on vulnerability and asks what a ?three-dimensional human wellbeing? approach?a complement to more traditional ways of understanding poverty?might contribute to the analysis of vulnerability. (?)