ABSTRACT
This chapter tackles a big and nebulous question: What is poverty? The chapter begins with some contextual background to remember as the book treats poverty as a social and behavioural element of human life, not an abstract economic element. The chapter then discusses some components of poverty: absolute versus relative poverty and multi-dimensionality. The body of the chapter is a description and comparison of poverty conceptualisations and satellite concepts, including income poverty, deprivation, exclusion, capabilities, subjective or consensual poverty, social–relational elements, and time scales of poverty. Together, these concepts give us an idea of the complexity and the range of issues faced by poor people the world over, with a particular set of measures and examples for Australian contexts, but ultimately, no one easy answer for what poverty is. However, all the content of this chapter can be used in a contextual analysis of individual and contextual experiences of poverty.
