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Latin America is both the world's most urbanized fastest developing regions, where the links between social exclusion, inequality and violence are clearly visible. The banal, ubiquitous nature of drug crime, robbery, gang and intra-family violence destabilizes countries' economies and harms their people and social structures. Encounters with Violence & Crime in Latin America explores the meaning of violence and insecurity in nine towns and cities in Columbia and Guatemala to create a framework of how and why daily violence takes place at the community level. It uses pioneering new methods of participatory urban appraisal to ask local people about their own perceptions of violence as mediated by family, gender, ethnicity and age. It develops a typology which distinguishes between the political, social, and economic violence that afflicts communities, and which assesses the costs of consequences of violence in terms of community cohesion and social capital. This gives voice to those whose daily lives and dominated by widespread aggression, and provides important new insights for researchers and policy-makers.

Fifty years after Oscar Lewis's famous depiction of five Mexican families caught in a \"culture of poverty,\" Caroline Moser tells a very different story of five neighborhood women and their families strategically accumulating assets to escape poverty in the Ecuadoran city of Guayaquil. InOrdinary Families, Extraordinary Lives, Moser shows how a more sophisticated understanding of the complexities of asset accumulation as well as poverty itself can help counter inaccurate stereotypes about global poverty. It provides invaluable insight into strategies that may help people in developing countries improve their wellbeing. The similar socioeconomic characteristics and economic circumstances of the Guayaquil families in 1978, when Moser began her research, set the stage for a natural experiment. By 2004, these circumstances varied widely. Moser captures the causes and consequences of these developments through economic data, anthropological narrative, and personal photos. She then places this compelling story within the broader context of political, economic, and spatial changes in Guayaquil and Ecuador. Moser describes how households in a Third World urban slum relentlessly and systematically fought to accumulate human, social, and financial capital assets. Her longitudinal account of their odyssey captures long-term trends and changes in perception that are missed in snapshot assessments. Chapters in this holistic story cover diverse issues such as housing and infrastructure, community mobilization and political negotiation, employment, family dynamics, violence, and emigration.

Gender planning is not an end in itself but a means by which women, through a process of empowerment, can emancipate themselves. Ultimately, its success depends on the capacity of women's organizations to confront subordination and create successful alliances which will provide constructive support in negotiating women's needs at the level of household, civil society, the state and the global system.Gender Planning and Development provides an introduction to an issue of primary importance and constant debate. It will be essential reading for academics, practitioners, undergraduates and trainees in anthropology, development studies, women's studies and social policy.

Provides a set of case studies of asset-building projects around the globe aimed at designing and implementing public policies that will increase the capital assets of the poor. Highlights the ways in which poor households and communities can move out of poverty through longer-term accumulation of capital assets.

The papers in this volume discuss the strategies adopted by people to accumulate assets through migration, housing investments, natural resources management, and informal businesses and consider how an asset-based social policy could enable those strategies or help them overcome the constraints of an unfavorable institutional environment.

Aid is widely perceived to have failed at poverty reduction. The last decade has seen a renewed focus on poverty and a number of changes in aid management. Will these improve aid's effectiveness at reducing poverty? The adoption of the International Development Targets is an important rallying point in emphazising poverty concerns, but do not tell us how to achieve them. Sector programmes and Poverty Reduction Strategies can both be important in enhancing the efficiency of expenditures, though there have been problems in implementation, mainly of donors being reluctant to allow government to lead the process. Less desirable are the move to selectivity on the basis of ‘good policies’ and attempts to earmark debt relief to poverty reduction expenditures. But the real issue to be tackled is to ensure that a greater proportion of aid resources are used in ways which will directly benefit the poor. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Latin American experiences of conflict and building sustainable peace have tended to show a clear neglect of a gender analysis of the impacts of conflict and the peace negotiations that end it, much to the detriment of many women and men affected by and involved in the civil conflicts that have ravaged the region during the last thirty years. What do Colombian women and men have to learn from these experiences? In May 2000, a workshop entitled 'Latin American Experiences of Gender, Conflict, and Building Sustainable Peace' was held in Bogotá, Colombia with representatives from several Latin American countries. This paper briefly highlights some of the issues raised at the workshop and aims to provide lessons and recommendations for others working in the fields of conflict analysis and resolution, humanitarian assistance, and interventions for peace and development.