• Home
• Site Map
• Foreword
  • Foreword
  • Contributors & Copyright
• Introduction
  • Introduction
  • Methods
  • Sites
    • Why Pando and East Kalimantan?
    • Municipal Governments and Decentralisation in Bolivia
    • Municipal Governments and Decentralisation in Indonesia
• Part I. Concepts
  • Wellbeing and Poverty
    • Poverty is More Than Low Income
    • Poverty is a Lack of Wellbeing
    • Poverty and Wellbeing Have Many Dimensions
    • Further Reading
  • Local Governments and Poverty
    • How can Local Governments Reduce Poverty?
    • Four Steps to Improve Local Governmental Action
    • Further Reading
  • Forests and Poverty
    • How do Forests Influence Poverty?
    • What is Poverty in Forest Communities?
    • Are Forests Safety Nets, Poverty Traps or Escape Routes?
    • Further Reading
• Part II. Tools
  • Monitoring
    • What is monitoring?
    • Types of Monitoring
    • Indicators
    • When to monitor?
    • Who conducts monitoring?
    • Linking monitoring to planning
  • Participatory Planning
    • What is participatory planning?
    • Why is participatory planning useful?
    • When and where is participatory planning done?
    • Who should participate?
  • Tool 1: Interactive Mapping
    • What is interactive mapping?
    • Interactive mapping step-by-step
    • Use interactive mapping for monitoring
  • Tool 2: Wellbeing Monitoring
    • What is a local wellbeing monitoring system?
    • Wellbeing monitoring step-by-step
    • Step 1: Define purpose, develop plan and budget
    • Step 2: Develop local poverty indicators and formulate survey questions
    • Step 3: Design the sampling strategy
    • Step 4: Train staff and perform the survey
    • Step 5: Analyse and present the data
    • Step 6: Present findings
  • Tool 3: Community Evaluation
    • Evaluating local government programmes through community focus groups
    • Steps 1-3
    • Steps 4-6
    • Steps 7-8
    • Community evaluation step-by-step
  • Tool 4: Scenario-based Planning
    • What is scenario-based planning?
    • Scenario-based planning step-by-step
    • Visioning
    • Pathways
• Final Remarks
• Acknowledgements
• Additional Resources
• PDF Version

Young children live on a Brazil nut estate in Pando, Bolivia. Photo by Kristen Evans

Understanding wellbeing and poverty is the first step to reducing poverty. Meaningful definitions are important in order to identify the causes of poverty, the objectives of poverty reduction, and the scope of what should be done.

Local governments need concepts of wellbeing and poverty that are locally relevant and that will help them make appropriate decisions. The concepts presented here can serve as starting points for discussions within governments and communities about poverty, wellbeing and the relationship between the two.

Declining poverty means increasing wellbeing. Both terms are interwoven and look at the same problem from two different sides. A general definition of poverty is ‘a lack of wellbeing’ and both terms are used in this source book interchangeably. For instance, if a person completely lacks wellbeing, she is in poverty. On the other hand, if she is in a state of high wellbeing, her life is characterised by prosperity, happiness and satisfaction.

Although this definition is not conventional, it is useful when trying to accommodate different national concepts and helpful when assessing and analysing various dimensions of poverty. Furthermore, ‘poverty’ often has a negative connotation of passivity, incompetence or backwardness; use of the term can be offensive or demeaning. The term ‘wellbeing’ allows discussion of poverty in more positive terms. Hence, ‘poverty’ should be read as ‘lack of wellbeing’ and ‘wellbeing’ as ‘reduced poverty’.

© 2007 Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
Contributors and copyright information