Post-development and Poverty: an assessment

This article presents a critical assessment of the post-development critique of poverty, distinguishing between claims made about how poverty is represented in ‘modern’ poverty analysis (the ‘representations critique’) and claims about trends in, and causal analysis of, consumption poverty (the ‘marginalisation thesis’). In general empirical evidence does not support ‘headline’ claims concerning the lack of correspondence of consumption poverty to local needs and the worsening of consumption poverty. There is support for other positions concerning the relativity of nutritional adequacy norms and the limits of ‘standard’ causal analysis of poverty. These latter elements, however, add little to existing critiques which are well known in the poverty literature.