The Challenges of Conflict-Sensitive Poverty Alleviation

The earlier emphasis on state-organized redistribution of income and wealth has largely been supplanted by attempts to encourage the rich to voluntarily contribute to local public goods . .. What appears to be of critical importance in assessing such claims is the magnitude of their direct impact on the private asset base of poorer individuals, i.e., on their private consumption ... [P]hilanthropic provision of public goods that are intrinsically valuable, but have negligible income-augmenting effects on the non-rich, may often be reasonably viewed as comple-mentary to a policy of redistribution. The poor do bene fi t from such provision, but the rich bene fi t more.