Never the Twain Shall Meet

Poverty is arguably the most critical and central concept of development. However, the relevance given to particular aspects of poverty has changed over the years and with it, the manner in which poverty has been represented, thus indicating that our conceptual relationship with poverty may be described as contentious. Equally problematic, how notions of poverty are accepted or contested by ‘those who need to be developed’ i.e. the poor themselves, is often unknown. The book investigates how poverty has been defined from the 1970s to the present and compares the definitions with the description of poverty as offered by the poor themselves. The findings illustrated how the two views differ. Indeed, for the poor themselves, the causality of poverty mattered i.e. there was a level of self-responsibility or blame for being poor. The results also revealed that the poor did not view themselves simply as the passive victims of negative external forces. Therefore, a major issue in the execution of pro-poor policy and development is the dominant frames of development actors which alternately hindered or concealed the ‘voices’ of the poor.