In the six decades since the mid 20th century, the world has experienced phenomenal urban growth, especially in the developing world. This growth has been closely associated with increasing levels of poverty and deprivation characterized by lack of access to safe water supplies, proper sanitation and access to assets. Other features include slums, informal settlements and low employment. This demographic shift is taking place within a context of low rates of economic growth and political engagement between the state and civil society. Lesotho, while sharing these experiences, is also one of the poorest countries in the world, ranking 158 out of 177 according to the UN Human Development Index. This has largely determined the nature of urbanization, with deepening economic problems in most of the country, rural and urban, resulting in poverty. Nevertheless, there has been a profound shift in location of that poverty. Whereas before it was overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon, now poverty is urbanized. In addition, due to the nature of urban development in the country, poverty is primarily concentrated in Maseru – the primary city of this small, land-locked country. While literature concentrates much on developing world cities, including those of Africa, it is silent on the impact of urbanization on poverty in Maseru. This thesis attempts to fill this gap and argues that rapid and differentiated forms of urbanization have increased poverty in Maseru. It studies how differentiated forms and patterns of urbanization have affected the manifestations of poverty in different parts of Maseru. It also analyses the different livelihood strategies employed by the poor residents of the three communities (Thibella, Sekamaneng and Motimposo) in Maseru as the increase in urbanization has unsettled conventional livelihood strategies, compelling them to employ different livelihood strategies to survive. Further, the study examines how the urban governance systems and people within them are coping with these pressures. The study concludes that the increased poverty in Maseru resulted from Lesotho and Maseru’s historic development trends, as the results confirm. However, urbanization significantly exacerbated this poverty. The varied processes of urban growth (inward migration and urban encroachment) have affected the manifestations of poverty and created different experiences of poverty in Maseru and, in turn, shaped the livelihood strategies of its inhabitants. The urban governance is failing to cope with the demands of this growth further increasing poverty.

Thesis advisor: James Bernauer / 1. This dissertation explores the apparently known object of our thought that is called poverty. To do so, it attempts an analysis that begins by noting that poverty has a past, which is not history, and constitutes destitution in specific ways. More precisely, my dissertation consists of fathoming what poverty might be by identifying those elements that, at a specific moment in our history, articulated the emergence of a problematization that continues to make its presence felt today. My goal is to pinpoint and describe those specific elements that have become conditions of possibility for a problematization of poverty which, although historically contingent, has shaped our way of thinking upon and acting against poverty. In order to carry out such a task, I have used specific conceptual tools inherited from the philosophy of Michel Foucault. 2. This dissertation contends that when the police of the poor began to be established in the second half of the Spanish and American eighteenth century the emergence of a new problematization of poverty began to crystallize. This problematization implied a discontinuity regarding the knowledge encompassed in the doctrine of charity, which nevertheless bequeathed to it some essential parts. The emergence of a police problematization supposed the emergence of governmental knowledge and the slow fading away of the problematization organized around charity. Curiously, this problematization will be constituted both in opposition to and also in articulation with the Christian doctrine of charity. 3. Chapter two of this dissertation will be devoted to the doctrine of charity as it existed at the beginning of the Spanish eighteenth century. The chapter does not affirm that such Spanish-American variations of charity were particularly novel. Yet it is important to trace its forgotten truth and organize, albeit briefly, its governmental knowledge. In doing so, it will be possible for us to not only understand better the problematization of poverty that charity generated at the beginning of the eighteenth century in both Spain and América, but also the subsequent appropriation of charity by the enlightened science of the police. At the beginning of the eighteenth century in Spain and América, Catholic charity was a regime of truth whose validity concerning poverty had no serious rivals in either the Iberian Peninsula or on American soil. Charitable governmentality articulated a problematization of poverty revolving around the threat to physical life caused by material needs, the suffering provoked by pain, the hate that inclined towards revenge, and the correction of one who has fallen into sin. A distinctive type of government will be needed to tackle each one of these issues. Thus, the regime of truth of charity will be articulated by a government of material needs and the excess of goods through the exercise of almsgiving, a government of pain through the exercise of tribulation, a government of hate through the exercise of loving your enemy, and a government of correction through the exercise of fraternal correction. Almsgiving was the charitable way of governing how to deal with material needs and excess and was organized around the precept of not killing one’s neighbor. However, almsgiving was not just a precept. Its purpose was to make the subject become entirely Christian by giving life to his faith. Thus, the giver became a charitable steward who united himself with God, with the neighbor and with himself in the act of giving. Alms initially forged this threefold unification. Charity was thus a vital regime of truth which carried on its shoulders the truth of the believer, the life of the community, and the divine government of the world. 4. In the middle of the century identified with the Enlightenment, the age-old concern about poverty found a new moment of inquietude both in Spain and in Spanish America. Within the limits marked by the thought contained in Bernardo Ward’s Obra Pía (Pious Work) (1750) and the laws on the police of the poor that established the Diputaciones de Caridad (Charity Councils) (1778), destitution emerged as a State affair that the science of the police was in charge of solving. Chapter three is devoted to the forgotten science called the science of the police. The science of the police during the Enlightenment was a body of knowledge about how to know and govern the interior of the State, including the vassals. Like all of the arts of governing, the science of the police was teleological, and happiness was its end goal. The mandate of the science of the police was to increase the forces of the interior of the State, and to do so it must first identify those forces and learn about them in order to eventually multiply them. Such identification not only refers to which of the activities were to be preferred, but also concerns the objects from which riches are gained—namely, land, merchandise, and vassals. Among these three elements, the vassals stand out as the police's privileged object of the science of the police. The wealth—and therefore the international position of the State—depends, finally, on the vassals being productive forces. Thereby a permanent attempt to conserve and increase not only the number but also the usefulness of those subjects was made in order to strengthen the State. These attempts to conserve and augment the members of the State will be part of a thesis that we could call populationist. Poverty constituted an extraordinary threat for the science of the police because destitution undermined those factors that are considered necessary to make the population grow. Significantly, the poverty considered by the science of the police poses an urgency that is not exactly the same as that conceived by charity. Destitution was a problem of the conservation of the vassals and cast the State as the giver who must address this problem. Thus, the poverty characterized by the science of the police was seen primarily as a problem for the sovereign. Destitution, and with it also the poor, become an affair of the Enlightenment State. 5. After analyzing the science of the police, we might be inclined to explain the deployment of the police of the poor as a consequence of the science of the police that left behind—finally!—the charitable alethurgy used to comprehend the poor. However, charity was called again at the moment when the police writers and statesmen began to fashion a new way to think about and govern the needy—namely, once they had to shape and deploy one specific police for the poor. Chapter four will explore the peculiar relationship of these two dissimilar bodies of knowledge in the Enlightenment device called the police of the poor. The police problematization of poverty was modeled on some charitable questions, namely: Who are the faces of poverty? Should we give to them? What ought we to give? These questions will be an opening to think about poverty in the Enlightenment. To govern the poor in the truth, nevertheless, the police of the poor will answer these questions by accepting the police’s imperative to produce and circulate wealth in order to constitute a happy State. Despite the diversity of deficiencies of the poor, the vicious idleness that defines or surrounds the poor's material needs is the most pressing urgency for the police of the poor. The perils of idleness made it imperative to lead the poor towards active productivity. Thus, the police poor was constituted by the duality represented by material necessity on the one hand and inactivity—whether viciously voluntary or dangerously forced—on the other. The sovereign is on his way to becoming a king not only of justice and peace, but also of charity that assumes, as the central element of his sovereign figure, that the king should love the poor with the love of a father. Thus, the pious king who gives police alms begins to assume and to incorporate the duty of giving alms as a function of the State. The police of the poor found in alms a method of support. Almsgiving provided a well-known and mandatory way through which each vassal could contribute to sustain the poor of the State. In fact, the obligatory nature of alms seems to have made the idea of taxes that would support this public policy unnecessary. Also, almsgiving referred to a long and well-established truth: that in the act of giving you can spiritually transform the recipient. The police alms accept—with an easiness that never ceases to astonish—the possibility of delivering spiritual alms to the poor within the State under the sovereign's auspices. Even more surprising is that one of the primary ambitions of charitable giving is also a pillar in this police re-elaboration of alms—namely, the constitution of a subject through the act of giving. 6. The difficult position of charity since the middle of the eighteenth century—that is, the dispute that this dissertation will explore concerning some of its elements—puts us on the path of what Foucault called a "reflexive moment" (Foucault, OS, 242). This is a point in which the thinkers of the Enlightenment began to reflect on the truth from which they had to understand and govern poverty. The enlightened vassals lost the familiarity they used to have concerning a charitable way of governing the material necessity of the political association; they subjected charity to criticism; and, finally, they elaborated a governmental truth, which I have called police-charity truth, to govern the poor of the State in order to alleviate destitution. The police of the poor is the expression of this moment—or maybe its articulation. With the police of the poor, the enlightened subjects intervened in the politics of their time, generating—almost paradoxically—a transformation of charity and its continuity. Such an intervention was neither announced in the charitable alethurgy nor prefigured in the science of the police. It was instead an invention that articulated some of the concepts present in both bodies of knowledge, and in doing so crystallized a truth about poverty and the poor, as well as establishing a way of governing the needy towards happiness. The Enlightenment governmental knowledge on poverty was forged at its intersection with religious charity. Such a realization puts us on the path to a conclusion by Foucault, to which James Bernauer s.j. was one of the first people to call our attention. Namely, that western modernity, instead of being characterized by its dechristianization, is sometimes modeled by processes of "Christianization-in-depth." / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: Richard McGowan / The Fair Trade movement is not new. Its roots go all the way back to the 1940s, and since its inception many Fair Trade organizations have arisen to offer this alternative strategy for doing business. Coffee is most commonly associated with Fair Trade, and it is the product this paper seeks to explore. In a broad sense, this investigation will look at how close Fair Trade Coffee certification programs actually come to being fair. The working definition of fairness is the ability to provide economic opportunities to marginalized workers. A fair economy would properly reward hard-working farmers for their intense labors. Many Fair Trade initiatives argue this is not what exists. As a result, they pay a living wage and offer opportunities to coffee farmers—some of the poorest people in the world—with hopes that this will help advance them out of poverty. To see if this successfully promotes fairness in economics, this paper will focus on the benefits of certification to small-scale farmers, mainly regarding income, and on the development of the Fair Trade Coffee market. Ultimately, this research will demonstrate that this movement is at least somewhat successful at improving the economic situation of marginalized workers. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics Honors Program. / Discipline: Economics.

Thesis advisor: Rebekah L. Coley / This study asked low-income adolescents from rural communities directly how they define success, resilience, and progress. More specifically, it assessed the ways in which rural youth and their families are resilient and identifies the main obstacles they face. This study used the participatory method of Interpretive Focus Groups (IFGs). Together with the researcher, participants examined photographs taken in a previous study (Pratt-Ronco & Coley, 2006), along with transcripts of previous interviews. The data analysis was directed at gaining a better understanding of what resilience and social mobility mean to the adolescents in the sample and identifying the barriers that beset adolescents living in rural poverty. This methodology is a good fit for these questions because the answers lie in the adolescents' perspectives of their worlds. All too often, adults (academics, teachers, families, and the government) decide what it means to be successful, socially mobile, or resilient. This study asked adolescents to define these terms and thereby gives insight to the complexity of working with these youth. In addition to the Interpretive Focus Groups, thirteen educators were interviewed. The purpose of the educator interviews was to gain a better understanding of how school personnel perceived the problem of rural poverty. This information allowed for triangulation of the data, as well as a way to look for disconnects between teachers and students. The findings of this study shed light on an understudied population. There are two overarching themes which categorize the data collected: pervasive poverty and hope and resilience. The adolescents at the center of this research were surrounded by want and deprivation. They were isolated from resources, opportunities, and wealth. The reality of just how much adversity rural poor youth face on a daily basis is disconcerting. However, they showed great resilience, hope, and a "grittiness" that came from their rural poor existence. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling and Developmental Psychology.

Thesis advisor: Richard McGowan / Thesis advisor: Robert Murphy / Microfinance has been heralded as the solution to global poverty by optimists in the development field. Many regard the practice of extending unprecedented financial access to the poor through small loans as a necessary and important tool in the development process. The industry has grown and changed shape over the last two decades and recently has come under fire. The new face of microfinance has included for-profit lenders, usurious interest rates, loan sharks, and suicides. Many critics are beginning to question the ethics, practices and efficacy of microfinance. They claim that microfinance cannot make more than a marginal impact on poverty, and more serious development efforts should address structural causes of underdevelopment. This paper will examine the effects microfinance on extreme poverty as defined by the poverty headcount ratio at $2 a day and $1.25 a day. The study will focus on the Latin America and Caribbean. Through regression analysis, this paper measures the effects of microfinance on the poverty rate while controlling for structural economic changes. We will conclude that microfinance has a statistically significant effect on extreme poverty in this region. These results are an important response to critics who posit that the costs of microfinance outweigh the benefits. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics Honors Program. / Discipline: Economics.

Thesis advisor: Robert J. Starratt / Parent involvement is critical to student success. Many schools across the nation are making a concerted effort to establish relationships between teachers and parents. There are a myriad of barriers that prevent those relationships from occurring. The challenge is even greater in urban schools. This qualitative case study examines the impact of volunteer teacher perceptions and attitudes on establishing relationships with urban parents at an all girls' middle school in the inner city. The study specifically investigated the beliefs of volunteer teachers before and after their participation in the study. The study will also examine whether teachers considered parents as an in integral part in supporting their children's learning as a result of their participation in the study. Five volunteer teachers, a master teacher and the parent coordinator participated in the study over the course of a year and a half. The data from this study showed that despite cultural and socio-economic differences, volunteer teacher can work with urban parents. The findings indicate volunteer teachers do value parental involvement. Teachers believe with continued professional development, they can establish authentic relationships with parents. Teachers in the study reported that parents want the best for their children. Teachers indicated that their relationships with parents are critical to student success. The findings of this study will provide implications for educational practice, policy, future research and researchers' leadership. Limitations to the study include a small sample size, the duration of the study and the role of researcher as Head of School. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Administration.

Thesis advisor: Kathleen McInnis-Dittrich / The purpose of this study was to investigate the dynamics of decision-making in formulating anti-poverty policies in Palestine. Particularly, this study was concerned with exploring the key decision makers, their roles, and how the power relationship among them influences the process of formulating anti-poverty policies. In addition, this study was intended to investigate the knowledge about the dynamics of decision making within the Palestinian National Authority (PNA): how actual decisions are made about anti-poverty policies and who is making decisions. Moreover, the scope of this study also included how the unique economic, social, and political contexts of Palestine influence the process of formulating anti-poverty policies. Further, this study explored how anti-poverty policies impact the lives of everyday poor Palestinians. This study utilized political theories, colonialism theory, and hegemony theory, to understand the external factors that affect the formulation of anti-poverty policies. Also, it used public policy theories, elitism, pluralism, and bounded rationality theory, to explore how anti-poverty policies are made and who made such policies in Palestine. This study employed a qualitative approach with a social constructivist paradigm of inquiry. This case study focused on two major sites that are responsible for formulating social policies in Palestine: the Ministry of Social Affairs (MOSA) and the Ministry of Planning and Administrative Development (MOPAD) in Ramallah. The findings of this study indicated that significant changes have occurred as regards who the key decision makers are and what roles they play in the formulation of anti-poverty policies. In analyzing the power relationship among the key decision makers, the findings showed that although the PNA has increased its control over the decision-making process, the international donor agencies continue to significantly influence this process. The data also revealed that unlike the models of policy making in democratic countries (such as elitism or pluralism), the approach to developing anti-poverty policies in Palestine reflects the participatory model. Consistent with the theory of bounded rationality, the findings revealed that anti-poverty policies have been made with financial, material, political, and other limitations. Implications for formulating anti-poverty policies and for future research are discussed. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.

Magister Commercii - MCom / Amongst many challenges, South Africa is still struggling to address the problem of high levels of poverty in the country more than two decades after the apartheid regime has ended. The government has however remained resolute in its effort to alleviate poverty especially through the provision of social grants. The expansion of the social assistance scheme after the apartheid regime has played an important role in extending benefits to a wider population of South Africans particularly the poor and the vulnerable groups. The effects of social grants on poverty have been proven to be effective. This has been widely tested empirically using the monetary approach as a measurement of poverty. However, few academic works have studied this effect on multidimensional poverty. Moreover, existing studies have focused predominantly on single poverty dimensions. As a result, this study investigates whether social grants reduce multidimensional poverty in South Africa. This study uses the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) as a poverty measurement, which encompasses three dimensions of poverty. This dissertation found poverty to have declined over the years but it is still prevalent amongst households headed by blacks and females residing in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo provinces with large household. The relationship between social grants and multidimensional poverty is tested empirically through a logistic regression using the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) data for Wave 4, year 2014/15 to be specific. The empirical findings reveal that a R1 increase in income from social grants results in a 1% decrease in the odds of a household being multidimensional poor. As much as social grants reduce multidimensional poverty, they have been found to be statistically insignificant and thus less effective in the reduction of multidimensional poverty.

This thesis presents findings from a longitudinal study of young people living in poverty providing a unique insight into their lives. The research set out to explore three themes, namely how young people end contact successfully (or not) from support, their experiences of the ‘transition to adulthood’ and also what triggered, helped and hindered those who were trying to desist from offending. It was revealed that a small number never left Includem’s Transitional Support, a unique service set up in Scotland providing emotional and practical help for vulnerable young people in this age group. For those who did leave, many had limited to no other support in their lives and were reluctant to ask for help again even when they were in real need. They were all acutely aware of their precarious situation. ‘Adulthood’ denoted certainty for them and was not viewed as a feasible destination. Members of the group dealt with this differently. Almost all retained hope of achieving their goals and in doing so suffered a form of ‘cruel optimism’, conversely, a smaller number scaled back on their aspirations, sometimes even to the extent of focusing on their immediate day to day survival. Over the course of the study most participants became more hopeless, isolated and withdrawn. Although they still wanted to achieve their original ambitions of having a job, own place and being settled this appeared less likely over time. A key finding from this study is that those who managed least had accepted the idea that independence was about ‘going it alone’ and proving oneself by oneself, but on the other hand, those who coped better viewed independence as being interdependence and welcomed help from others. It emerged that those who had offended had done so to achieve a sense of belonging, rejected by home and education. By desisting they moved from having some element of status and respect to then living a legitimate but often impoverished existence overshadowed by their past. This study opens up a series of questions about the pains of desistance and the pains of poverty. It is suggested that considering desistance and adulthood in terms of citizenship would emphasise the individual’s and societies interdependence so that rights, responsibilities and potential are recognised. At present, I argue that there is a mutual dismissal. Society dismisses impoverished youth and they in turn do not see that society holds anything for them. I call for renewed hope so that inaction and continued poverty and inequality are not rendered inevitable, and for criminologists to also embrace the idea of interdependence so that this issue is dealt with beyond the parameters of this field.

The issue of the high levels of external debt in the poorest nations has become an increasing matter of concern for the industrialized nations due to the difficulties that heavily indebted nations have with sustaining economic growth. In 2005 the Group of Eight pledged to cancel the debt of the world?s most indebted countries that are eligible for the relief under the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative. Based on this pledge, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund approved the debt cancellation in March 2006, with debt cancellation commencing on June 1, 2006. As a reaction, this thesis provides an overview of arguments in favor of debt cancellation as well as against debt cancellation as they are introduced in economic literature. After presenting and taking all the points of view into consideration this thesis comes to the conclusion whether the debt cancellation is a good way to go.