Poverty and social exclusion: theory and policy

This chapter shows how the current ‘social exclusion’ concept has been deployed in the UK and the historical, institutional, and political contexts that have influenced the debates surrounding the causes of poverty and social exclusion. It notes that the ‘social exclusion’ concept originated in EU poverty programmes during the 1980s while in Britain and the US the same concerns were addressed in terms of the emergence of an urban ‘underclass’ (Silver 1994). It further notes that the concepts are not unrelated and both are concerned with the relative roles of agency and structural and/or institutional causes and both emerged together with debates surrounding the ‘new poverty’ associated with global economic changes.