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Participation, Pluralism and Perceptions of Poverty

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Book cover The Many Dimensions of Poverty

Abstract

The words ‘poverty’ and ‘dimension’ are each used with many meanings. In this chapter, the meanings given to them are as follows:

Poverty includes bad conditions and/or experience of life. This means more than simply material poverty or lack. It is the meaning implied by the statement with which the World Development Report (WDR) 2000/01 Attacking Poverty opens ‘Poverty is pronounced deprivation in wellbeing’ (World Bank 2000: 15). ‘Multidimensional poverty’ is then the same as ‘multidimensional deprivation’.2 Well-being is the experience of good quality of life, and ill-being, its opposite, the experience of bad quality of life. This applies especially where material and other deprivations and disadvantages interact and reinforce each other (see Figures 8.1–8.4).

The promise of both participatory research and the focus on well-being is that they will enable us to hear genuinely different voices, voices that speak from and about realities other than those configured by development discourse and institutions.

(White and Pettit 2004: 95)

For comments on an earlier version of this paper I am grateful to participants in the Conference on The Many Dimensions of Poverty at the International Poverty Centre, Brasilia, in August 2005. I thank Francisco Filho and Dee Donlan for support and assistance with the diagrams and editing.

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Authors
  1. Robert Chambers
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sydney, Australia

    Nanak Kakwani (Former Director) (Former Director)

  2. International Poverty Centre, Brazil

    Nanak Kakwani (Former Director) (Former Director)

  3. Bar-Ilan University, Israel

    Jacques Silber

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© 2013 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

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Chambers, R. (2013). Participation, Pluralism and Perceptions of Poverty. In: Kakwani, N., Silber, J. (eds) The Many Dimensions of Poverty. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592407_8

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