This thesis examines the experiences, circumstances and difficulties faced by young homeless people residing in hostels in the county of Kent, South East England, especially those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ). My research suggests that there is an increase in LGBTQ youth homelessness due to young people 'coming out' at younger ages than before and encountering difficulties in their family homes that lead to their homelessness. I refer to this as 'the paradox of progress'. Due to political advances in gay rights and an increased media presence of charismatic LGBTQ proponents, youth are changing their outlook on sexuality and gender identity, but paradoxically due to generational differences, some meet adversities at home. Yet, this research also shows that an ensuing prevalence and increase of LGBTQ youth in homeless hostels across the county is a significant concern that thus far has been overlooked. In this thesis I demonstrate that youth homelessness is distinct from adult homelessness and is often misunderstood. Using data obtained through anthropological fieldwork over a period of one year, combined with my professional experience as a support worker working in local homeless hostels for over eight years, I examine and analyse the structural violence and inequalities that young people encounter as they attempt to cope with their homelessness caused by various factors such as deprived family backgrounds, class and a housing crisis that has predominantly affected disadvantaged youth. The long-term dedicated ethnographic fieldwork approach of my research has enabled me to glean insights about current ideas about home, homelessness, and also experiences of young people who live in difficult circumstances, subsequently enabling this research to challenge contemporary understandings of and responses to youth homelessness. Homeless youth navigate their lives in localities where ideas of 'home' hinge upon idealised heteronormative family life trajectories and generalised stigmas of youth homeless as beggars, rough sleepers or substance misusers and as culpable for their own predicaments. In this thesis, I discuss how the lack of or slim options for housing and support available to homeless youth in Kent, reflect upon how the State and the general public homogenise and stigmatise youth who are from working class backgrounds, thus creating further disadvantages that subject them toward structural violence. The anthropology of youth literature (e.g. Wulff 1995, LeVine and New 2008, Peluso 2015) suggests that the agency of young individuals should not be underestimated or subsumed under broader adult studies but that their lives ought to be studied in their own right. My ethnographic data contributes to such literature and further engages the anthropology of home, gender and sexuality to understand the issues that come together to comprise contemporary youth homelessness in Britain. Ethnographic research is well suited to explore intimate topic such as sexuality and homelessness, and thus far anthropologists have not studied LGBTQ youth homelessness. To date, the monitoring of sexual orientation and gender identity in the voluntary sector uses unrealistic figures that obscure the severity of LGBTQ youth homelessness. Subsequently LGBTQ individuals are not recognised by funding bodies and the State as a significant population and therefore resources are not allocated to alleviate their challenges and/or support them. This thesis argues that a prominent reason for LGBTQ youth homelessness is the paradox of progress; that the broader political advances in LGBTQ rights are not yet resonating in the reality and lived experiences of LGBTQ individuals in Kent. Young people who are both homeless and a sexual or gender minority, experience exclusion by living outside of the norm in terms of their sexuality/gender identities, as well as living outside of normative institutions such as, the educational system, home and the family. Furthermore, I suggest that conflicting generational views toward 'alternative' sexualities and genders contribute to the increasing numbers of LGBTQ youth in homelessness services. This thesis contributes to the limited ethnographic studies available regarding youth homelessness in anthropology. It also aims to offer insights to broad literatures in social, political, economic and applied anthropology, the anthropology of youth, the anthropology of care, kinship studies, the anthropology of Britain and the anthropology of home and homelessness. Additionally, it has the potential to be of interdisciplinary interest, as it draws on insights from the disciplines of sociology, human geography as well as literature from queer and gender studies. Finally, this research will inform homelessness and housing policies and facilitate a better understanding of the under-researched topic of LGBTQ youth homelessness. The outcomes of my research suggest that policy makers in voluntary and government agencies need to employ a culturally sensitive approach to housing policy for youth and young individuals who identify as LGBTQ and those that are homeless.

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This thesis provides a critical analysis of how Islamic-based Civil Society Organisations (IBCSOs) contribute to poverty reduction in Egypt, through a qualitative study of four Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). The thesis closely examines case study IBCSOs’ organisational structures, their activities and the values that shape their conceptualisation of poverty. It reveals the similarities between IBCSOs’ poverty reduction work and official social protection, and discusses how their approaches to poverty reduction can be understood in terms of the various discourses justifying social protection (risks, rights and needs). The thesis also uses these case studies to examine the validity of Faith-Based Organisations (FBOs) as vehicles for poverty reduction and social protection. Finally, it discusses the relationship between these organisations’ poverty reduction activities and political mobilisation through an examination of the role they played in the recent political rise of the Islamist movement in Egypt, as well as the impact of recent political developments on their operations. A key purpose of this critical investigation of IBCSOs' approaches to poverty reduction is to explore more broadly their wider implications for development theory and practice by assessing whether they can contribute to existing knowledge on the means of civil society’s contribution to poverty reduction and development.

Social Protection, and in particular social assistance, has emerged as a key area of international development policy. Recognition of the important role of social protection policies is aligned to a growing consensus on their role in reducing poverty and vulnerability and in preventing people from falling into poverty and facilitating exit from poverty. In the late 1990s, the World Bank (WB) developed the Social Risk Management (SRM) framework as a new conceptual framework for analysing social protection in developing countries. In the SRM, risk taking, the proactive management of risk at household level, was argued to be essential in enabling poor households to invest and grasp opportunities for economic development and poverty reduction. This research examines and conceptualizes the why and the how of investment by households in poverty. The research also examines the extent to which access to social assistance interventions may play a positive or negative role in the process. The thesis argues that the SRM oversimplifies and underestimates a variety of factors and processes that play a role in the household’s investment behaviour in three dimensions of their life, namely savings, education and health. In the research, household decision making is conceptualised as a two stage process of ‘constructing’ investment preferences (what they are willing to do), and of ‘realizing’ or ‘revealing’ household choices (what they actually do). The empirical findings indicate that access to social assistance did not appear to have a role in constructing investment preferences. However, it had limited role under certain circumstances in favouring the realization of households’ investment preferences. The research suggests that the SRM fails to encapsulate the complexity of household investment decisions, crucial to exiting poverty. Building on some of the concepts emerged in the research, I develop a ‘behavioural’ variation of the ‘risk taking /poverty exit’ component of the SRM in an attempt to improve the explanatory capacity of this framework. The research utilises the grounded theory framework (GT), adapted to a low income country context, and investigates the role of social assistance in household behaviour through an extensive field work in Bangladesh with urban households targeted by the Old Age Allowance Scheme (OAA), one of the largest social assistance schemes in Bangladesh.

Living in poverty and persistent low income has detrimental impacts on many facets of the lives of parents and children. During the early years of the new millennium this was of primary concern to the Scottish and UK governments: in response, policies were implemented to improve children's developmental outcomes, and to increase both maternal employment and levels of income for low paid and unemployed families. Previous qualitative research on families living in poverty revealed that families have varying degrees of additional vulnerability depending on their levels of social assets, e.g. social support, and financial vulnerabilities, e.g. debt and financial stress. High levels of social assets appeared to attenuate, and low levels of social assets appeared to exacerbate, the negative impacts of living in poverty. These social and financial assets/vulnerabilities comprise two of the five domains of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) quantified for use in this thesis. This thesis explores what impacts, if any, social and financial assets/vulnerabilities have on children's cognitive (C) development, as measured by naming vocabulary and picture similarities, and on their social, emotional and behavioural (SEB) development as measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. To achieve this aim this research uses the first five sweeps of the annually-collected longitudinal Growing up in Scotland (GUS) birth cohort study. The analysis uses the technique of factor analysis to derive the latent constructs financial and social assets/vulnerabilities, and OLS multiple regression analysis with quasi-variance to test the associations. The research employs multiple dimensions of economic disadvantage - longitudinal income poverty, material deprivation, longitudinal income poverty and material deprivation combined, and longitudinal income inequality - to explore the effects, not only between the lengths of time people have lived in poverty, but also across the income inequality spectrum, i.e. persistent low income versus persistent high income. The results of the research show that high maternal social assets and financial vulnerabilities separately are associated with higher and lower levels of child SEB development respectively, especially for children living in persistent low income. The relationship did not hold for children’s cognitive development. It also reveals that children whose mothers are experiencing additional financial stress and debt have lower CSEB scores (but not picture similarities), especially in relation to SEB development. There is also a relationship between social and financial assets/vulnerabilities: having high social assets is statistically associated with lower financial stress and debt for those living with lower incomes. This thesis argues that mothers, families and children living in poverty would benefit from policy and practice interventions that support geographical proximity of family and friends, that foster close and supportive wider family relationships, and that promote access to credit that does not lead to unmanageable debt and detrimental levels of additional financial stress. The research notes that while the SLA has been a useful theoretical framework, effectively quantified, the GUS data are limited in how effectively it can construct the SLA as it is not dedicated to its measurement.

Zakat is an obligatory payment that a free and rational Muslim who owns a certain amount of wealth has to observe. The idea of zakat investment was initiated by the belief that providing the poor and needy with a non-substantial amount of fund that is mostly used to pay for their consumption is not enough to tackle poverty. Collection of zakat itself also has been shown insufficient even to provide them with a subsistence level of income. Muslim scholars suggest a long-term measure involving the investment of zakat that not only supplement the poor with a stream of income that is more consistent and continuous, equip them with the opportunity for equity participation or provide them with projects that help improve their livelihood but also provide a source of revenue to fund overall Muslim economic development. However, Muslim scholars found that investment of zakat may make the payment legally vulnerable from the Shari>ca (Islamic law) point of view. Thus, many fatwa>s and views have been expressed by the Muslim scholars as guidelines to ensure that the investment activities conform to Shari>ca. This study examines contemporary policy and practice in the management of zakat investment in Malaysia, particularly at two zakat institutions: Majlis Agama Islam Wilayah Persekutuan and Lembaga Zakat Selangor. These two institutions are selected because they are the most vibrant zakat institutions in the country in terms of zakat revenue and they also are the most active in investing zakat. Given the many background complaints about the institutions’ inefficiencies in managing zakat particularly the large amount of undistributed zakat, it is thus pertinent to analyze the compliancy of these investment activities with the principles and purposes of zakat. The study finds that these institutions accordingly have moulded their investment activities not only to observe the principles of zakat but also according to the modern changes in the administration of zakat in the country as well as to cater for the recipients’ current needs. The study also finds that various policies have been set up to guide the management of these investment activities. Still, there remain numerous possibilities for improving these further.

Disability and poverty are related: there is a higher risk of disabled people becoming poor and of poor people becoming disabled. Although this relationship is recognised within disability scholarship, there is a lack of empirical evidence particularly in the context of Latin America. Taking data from five Latin American Countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico), this study tests the hypothesis that households with disabled members have higher levels of poverty compared with other households. Two research designs were used: a small-N comparative variable-oriented design using most-different cases; and a cross sectional design. Secondary data analysis revealed that households with disabled members have higher levels of poverty using direct and indirect measures (e.g. income; subjective and multidimensional indices) compared with other households and that this held true across the five countries studied. The findings from this research have salience for policy makers internationally. The most important policy implication is that disabled people and their families need to be explicitly included in poverty reduction strategies and their extra needs should be recognised within these policies. Mitigating the risk of poverty for disabled people should be a universal policy goal.

This thesis examines the linkages between social protection and resilience to climate change among poor rural households. To date there is a very limited understanding of the potential role of social protection programmes in contributing to an increase in resilience of the rural poor with respect to climate change. An improved understanding of these links can help to build the knowledge base that is needed to help the poorest members of the society to adapt to the impacts of climate change. This gap in understanding is addressed in this thesis through a case study of the conditional cash transfer programme Oportunidades in two rural communities in Yucatan, Mexico, a region highly exposed to hurricanes and droughts. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected by means of household surveys, life-history interviews, key informant interviews, group discussions and participant observation. A social protection-resilience analytical framework was developed in order to guide the data collection and analysis. This framework is informed by a dynamic understanding of resilience, which integrates two resilience dimensions: the absorptive capacity (the ability to resist and recover from a shock) and the adaptive capacity (the ability to adapt to the effects of a shock). This framework is based on the proposition that social protection reduces vulnerability and, by doing so, this can also help to increase poor households resilience to climate change. The thesis found that the main role of Oportunidades is to provide a regular and predictable safety net that protects households from short-term risk, thus increasing households' absorptive capacity. The impact on the adaptive capacity of households is indirect and differentiated according to their respective poverty profiles. Furthermore, the research shows that certain features of the theory of change of Oportunidades, and its design, reduce the potential impact of the programme, creating trade-offs between the different resilience dimensions. This is the case because resilience to climate change and social protection literatures are derived from distinctive approaches, which frame vulnerability differently. The thesis concludes by making a case for social protection to be complemented by other interventions in a systemic approach that should explicitly consider climate change, in order to increase resilience and achieve sustainable poverty reduction.

Cette thèse revient sur les moyens de la prise en charge publique et par les associations de défunts dits ‘indigents’. Si la littérature sur ce sujet insistait grandement sur la catégorie des personnes de la rue et sur les idées de délaissement et de sacrifice, ce travail met en avant les différentes facettes, parfois conflictuelles, de l’intérêt public porté à ces morts. Cette recherche est principalement l’aboutissement d’une ethnographie menée auprès de l’association parisienne du Collectif les Morts de la Rue. Cette association dénonce depuis 2001 les conditions de vie et de morts des personnes de la rue et s’occupe, depuis 2003, des cérémonies funéraires pour tous les corps non-réclamés de la ville de Paris. L’enquête revient sur les motivations des deux groupes de bénévoles coexistant au sein de la même association, l’un se concentrant sur l’activisme en faveur des personnes de la rue (‘gueuler’) et l’autre sur les rituels des défunts non-réclamés, quelle que soit leur origine sociale (‘pleurer’). Ces deux groupes créent des communautés symboliques de morts et de vivants à travers des cérémonies, émotions et rituels. L’insistance du groupe des fondateurs sur l’activisme en faveur des vivants de la rue est parfois en contradiction avec l’implication plus générale de certains bénévoles pour tous les défunts non-réclamés. La thèse revient sur leur cohabitation au sein de la même association et montre comment des références communes à la fraternité humaine et à l’universalité de la mort ne suffisent pas à couvrir des motifs d’engagements divergents. / This research analyzes what happens to the deceased labeled as ‘paupers’ and managed through non-governmental organizations and public means in France. Where previous literature on the subject emphasized social categories such as homeless people and theories of sacrifice, this work puts forward conflicting public interests given to the dead labeled as ‘paupers’. This recearch draws mostly on ethnographic fieldwork with the Collectif Les Morts de la Rue, a parisian organization denouncing the life and death conditions of homeless people since 2001, and in charge of the funeral ceremony of any unclaimed body since 2003. The investigation shows how two groups of volunteers with two different primary interests developed over time. The first group is mainly concerned with political activism in favor of people living and dying on the streets. The second group focuses more on non-political rituals for all unclaimed bodies, regardless of their social status. The two groups coexist with mutual references to the dead and to humanity after death. Through rituals and public ceremonies using emotions, they create symbolic communities gathering both the living and dead. The strong emphasis of the first group on inequality and socio-economic structure is sometimes at odds with the more general emphasis of the second group on the universal bond between human beings, showing how shared references to death and humanity are not enough to cover diverging motivations inside the same organisation.

This thesis looks at how the long-standing battle between liberalism and populism in Argentina manifested in the 1990s in the struggles between neoliberalism and populism to hegemonise the discourse on civil society in national poverty reduction policy. It traces how, through their struggles to remain or become hegemonic, neoliberalism and the concrete form that populism took in the country – henceforth Argentinean populism – each incorporated some of the other’s views, made the other change, and transformed. Neoliberalism and Argentinean populism are considered antagonistic political projects that struggle to become hegemonic. Each project has normative viewpoints at its core, but also includes contingent characteristics acquired in specific historical contexts. For example, the package of market-liberalisation measures and the model of inward economic development are contingent characteristics of neoliberalism and Argentinean populism respectively. Civil society is seen as both a discourse emerging from struggles to hegemonise its meaning and the arena where struggles for political hegemony take place and, thus, where hegemony and counter-hegemony are manufactured (Gramsci, 1998 [1971]: 12, 13, 15, 204). Defining a discourse on civil society is, therefore, a fundamental hegemonic operation, which entails setting limits to the possibilities of hegemonic struggles that can take place in that arena. The thesis argues that the discourse on civil society in the poverty reduction policy area in the Argentina of the 1990s was neopopulist, understood here as the articulation of neoliberal and Argentinean populist discourses on civil society. The neopopulist discourse, however, was not fixed throughout the decade. It emerged (1990-1994), turned into what this thesis characterises as technopopulism (1995-1999) and was then challenged by populist views (2000-2001). While neoliberalism predominated during the decade, the mutations of the neopopulist discourse reflected the gradual colonisation of the predominantly neoliberal discourse by populism and the attempts of neoliberalism to retain its predominance. The conclusion stresses that the centrality of technical and institutional aspects in the neoliberal logic of hegemonic construction created a crucial interstice through which the intrinsically political populist discourse could permeate the neoliberal hegemony. As dislocations in the hegemonic discourse emerged, domestic factors and actors enabled the Argentinean populist discourse on civil society to grow within the neopopulist discourse, partially colonise it, and eventually challenge it. Policy-makers and implementers, whose profiles combined technical skills with deeply embedded populist views, were crucial in this process. Additionally, changes in the neoliberal discourse of the Multilateral Development Banks during the 1990s, as well as differences between these banks and between their official positions and their staff views, were contributory factors in this colonisation.