Amerindian Livelihoods,Outside Interventions,and Poverty Traps in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Recent efforts to explain the persistence of rural poverty have made frequent use of the concept of poverty traps, understood as self‐reinforcing poverty. The dynamic dimension of the poverty trap concept makes it a potentially useful tool for understanding conditions of persistent poverty, especially in circumstances where outside interventions “shock” the system with the intention of ending poverty and disadvantage. This article describes one such effort among a populous group of lowland Amerindians, the Shuar of Ecuador's Amazon region. Three small household surveys conducted at different times during the last 25 years suggest that the Shuar, despite having obtained access to land through a combination of their own efforts and outside interventions, have become enmeshed in a natural‐resource‐degrading poverty trap. Mestizos with land in the same region avoided this trap only by emigrating in large numbers. Secure access to land did not prevent the emergence of a poverty trap among the Shuar in large part because smallholders in Latin America faced difficult macrosociological and ecological conditions during the last decades of the twentieth century.     

Social Policy for Social Work: A Teaching Agenda

Though social justice is a central goal of the social work profession,the actual involvement of social workers in social change isvery limited. Moreover, training in social policy and policypractice in schools of social work is minimal. As such, practitionerslack the tools needed to analyse existing social problems andpolicies and to enable them to intervene in the policy processin order to better serve the needs of service users. This articleseeks to further social policy teaching within social work educationby engaging in a survey of the existing literature on the subjectand by offering a detailed programme for integrating this subjectinto the social work training system. The literature surveythat serves as a basis for this programme includes a reviewof studies on the dilemmas linked to social policy teaching,on the goals and content of social policy courses in socialwork and on preferred teaching methods in this field.