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...

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...

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...

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...

Attempts to understand the causes of chronic poverty have largely centred on the concept of the poverty trap. In this perspective, the main focus is on the paucity of initial wealth or endowments, which under certain plausible conditions can create a trap from which a poor person will find it...