Understanding Poverty

Policies and strategies to fight global environmental degradation,gender inequality, and poverty are often inadequate, ineffective, or insufficient. Inresponse, this article seeks potential synergies and leverage points between threesignificant interrelated discourses that are often treated separately—development,gender, and environment. Proceeding from a brief history of development thinking andpoverty definitions, I describe indicators, strategies, and approaches to povertyreduction and gender equality. Second, I analyze how targeting, mainstreaming, andmarket-based initiatives all fail both to distinguish empirical from analytical genderand to incorporate environment and gender into development policy and action—despitetheir key role in meeting the normative goal of poverty reduction. Third, through apolitical-ecology lens, I suggest an integrated approach to poverty, inequality, andsocioenvironmental challenges that arise at the intersections of development, gender,and environment, and for that, I draw examples from research on social and environmentalchange and action in sub-Saharan Africa