Introduction: poverty – a contested subject

Different scholars have described poverty in different ways. For example, poverty is perceived as economic, social and psychological deprivation, occurring either among people or countries that lack resources to maintain or provide either individual or collective minimum levels of living. It is also described as something that impairs the ability to provide for minimum nutrition, health, shelter, education, security, leisure or other aspects considered necessary for life. Poverty may also be represented as an exclusionary relationship, including exclusion from an institutional network sufficient to maintain one's survival (McCarthy and Feldman, 1988; Like-Minded Group, 1990). Lewis (1962) observes that poverty has often seemed a natural and integral part of a whole way of life, intimately related to poor technology and/or poor resources or both. Causes of poverty lie in the dynamics of social and economic forces within societies that structure the production and distribution of resources, and it is a product of class antagonism, social problems that create the need for change. In terms of the distribution of resources, it is also argued that poverty originates in injustice rather than scarcity of resources. This injustice is institutionalised in the social, political, legal and economic structures of society (Sobhan, 2002); when someone becomes or stays poor, this is a structural social consequence (Ferge and Millar, 1987). For Green and Hulme (2005), poverty is not a natural fact, but a social experience. Poverty is not a characteristic of a certain group of people; rather, it characterises a particular situation in which people may find themselves at a given point in time (Bastiaensen et al, 2005). In this way, poverty does not necessarily constitute any form of ‘identity’ group based on shared territory or culture (Hickey and Bracking, 2005).

The preceding discussion provides a glimpse of the various dimensions of understanding poverty. From these assorted perspectives, it is therefore reasonable to assume that there is no one correct approach and agreed definition of poverty. Poverty is a highly political concept. As Alcock (1993) suggests, what commentators mean by poverty depends upon what they intend to do about it. Hence, academic and political debate about poverty is not merely descriptive; it is prescriptive too. Poverty can be perceived through a range of contested definitions, which overlap and sometimes contradict each other.