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Viewing report
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Never the Twain Shall Meet. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, June 2009, Pages: 304
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.
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