This paper uses five life histories from three locations in Zimbabwe - one peri-urban, one urban and one rural to provide a window on current processes of impoverishment and adverse coping. Each case and location highlight key aspects of Zimbabwe's recent economic and political turmoil. Together...

The policy brief describes the life stories of five people, to show the face of human face of chronic poverty. It also suggests that such life history material can be an important source of data for policies.

This synthesis paper focuses specifically on the relationship between economic growth and the chronically poor. To what extent are the chronically poor able to participate in growth or from the benefits of growth? What factors enhance or restrict this ability? To what extent is growth...

This paper aims to analyse how the term 'vulnerability' has been used in the Chronic Poverty Research Centre's (CPRC) initial set of working papers. The intention of this analysis is to show that 'vulnerability' can be utilised in a variety of ways, with different meanings, and different...

Smallholders now grow most of Malawi's main export crop – burley tobacco. Based on nineteen months' fieldwork in the Central Region, this article offers a sociological interpretation of why some smallholder growers spend a proportion of burley income on conspicuous consumption in rural towns...

The vibrant debate on randomized experiments within international development has been slow to accept a role for qualitative methods within research designs. Whilst there are examples of how 'field visits' or descriptive analyses of context can play a complementary, but secondary, role to...

Much poverty and development research is not explicit about its methodology or philosophical foundations. Based on the extended case method of Burawoy and the epistemological standpoint of critical realism, this paper discusses a methodological approach for reflexive inductive livelihoods...

This paper uses five life histories from three locations in Zimbabwe - one peri-urban, one urban and one rural - to provide a window on current processes of impoverishment and adverse coping. Each case and location highlight key aspects of Zimbabwe's recent economic and political turmoil....