Even if together we could make poverty history, we would not all do our part. The paper presents a device that makes it more likely for everybody to do his part. This is achieved by making everybody’s contribution dependent on the other people’s commitment to contribute given that certain conditions are fulfilled. Furthermore, a device is introduced which, based on the same general idea, doubles everybody’s donation. Finally, possibilities, assumptions and limitations of such devices are addressed.

Philosophy of history is currently dominated by postmodernist anti-realists who claim that historiography can never provide true accounts of the past. The Poverty of Anti-realism exposes the faulty premises and reasoning behind such assertions and shows that anti-realism has political implications unforeseen and unwanted by its adherents.

“I urge that we turn Kuhn on his head and demonstrate that a paradigm is nothing more than an arrested social development.” Notwithstanding the long debate to which The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has given rise since its publication in 1962, this quote from Steve Fuller’s assessment of its author’s legacy suggests an original if controversial project: may a better understanding of science arise from the ashes of idealist historicism! Yet rather than furnish the Marx to Kuhn’s Hegel, Fuller but (...) manages a pastiche of Proudhon, as it were, which calls for another inversion of titles as rejoinder in turn. There can be no doubt that some very important issues are raised in this book, but just as this reader’s expectations were dashed in its course, so the issues end.up curiously diminished; given the significance of the subject matter, it is of interest to find out why. (shrink)

In Riches and Poverty, Donald Winch explores the implications of a fundamental and influential idea in political economy. Adam Smith's science of the legislator provided a key to studying the rich and poor in commercial societies, transformed an ancient debate on luxury and inequality, and furnished a basis for assessing the American and French revolutions. Against this background, Britain embarked on its career as the first manufacturing nation, and Malthus made his first contributions to a debate which concluded with (...) the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Malthus provoked fierce opposition from the Lake poets, opening an intellectual rift that persisted throughout the nineteenth century and continues to influence our perceptions of cultural history. Donald Winch has written a compelling and consistently-argued narrative of these developments, which emphasises throughout the moral and political bearings of economic ideas. (shrink)

Through a study of the history of the concepts of wealth and poverty, this paper investigates the onset of a transition in the conceptual architecture of epidemiological research concerning social differences in mortality rates from 1858 to 1914. It raises the question as to what the concepts of wealth and poverty meant to those who used them and what objects of interventions the conceptual architecture surrounding the concepts enabled the researchers to create. It argues that a transition began (...) in the late 19th century in which an important framework for the understanding of causal relations behind the mortality patterns changed and that this change in turn influenced the scope of what was conceived as relevant objects of intervention. (shrink)

Each year, millions of people die from poverty-related causes. In this groundbreaking and thought-provoking book, Gwilym David Blunt argues that the only people who will end this injustice are its victims, and that the global poor have the right to resist the causes of poverty. He explores how the right of resistance is used to reframe urgent political questions: is illegal immigration a form of resistance? Can transnational social movements, such as the indigenous rights movement, provide the foundations (...) for civil resistance to global poverty? If peaceful resistance fails, is armed struggle justified? Do people living in affluent states have a responsibility to help even if it requires them to break the law? Giving clear historical examples and engaging with fields including philosophy, international law, history, and international political studies, this volume addresses real-world issues from terrorism to activism. It will be important for anyone interested in applied philosophy and global injustice. (shrink)

Poverty remains a critical socio-economic challenge in South Africa, deeply rooted in the country’s history of colonialism and apartheid. This article examines the multifaceted role of churches in poverty alleviation efforts in South Africa, spanning both historical and contemporary contexts. Through analysis of historical records and contemporary literature, it argues that while churches have significantly addressed poverty, a more comprehensive and transformative approach is needed. The study proposes adopting a missional ecclesiology framework to enhance the effectiveness of (...) church-led poverty alleviation initiatives, offering insights into how churches can engage more deeply and sustainably in the fight against poverty.Contribution: This research contributes to existing scholarship by: (1) Providing a comprehensive historical analysis of church involvement in poverty alleviation in South Africa. (2) Critically examining challenges and opportunities in contemporary church-led poverty alleviation efforts. (3) Proposing missional ecclesiology as a framework for enhancing church-based poverty alleviation initiatives. (4) Offering practical recommendations for churches to address poverty within South Africa’s unique socio-economic context. (shrink)

The two reforms that most contributed to the idea of an antipodean social laboratory at the end of the 19th century were the old age pension and state arbitration of the minimum wage. Both are said to reflect the influence of the new liberalism, buttressed by the emergence of the labour movement into politics. This paper argues that debates on the old age pension at the turn of the 19th century illustrate a more tangled set of liberal trajectories than either (...) a narrative of a unified Deakinite consensus, or of a new liberal importation, would allow. While there was clearly some new liberal influence in how New South Wales debated the pension, in Victoria an older tradition of colonial liberalism — which emphasized self-governance as much as social reform — meant that it was seen as much as a reward for good moral character as a measure to deal with poverty. (shrink)

I argue that stigmatization and inferiorization constitute the most destructive form of everyday poverty, the meaning of which is shown through a phenomenological interpretation of skid row. There are three parts to the paper. First, there is a brief discussion of poverty as a philosophical problem. Second, and ancillary to the analysis of skid row, there are discussions of the character of human dignity, everyday meaningful action and the psycho-social dynamics of stigmatization. Third, there is an analysis of (...) skid row which, drawing on Heidegger’s death-analysis in Being and Time, concludes by characterizing skid row poverty as a kind of living death. (shrink)

Hailed on publication in 1957 as "probably the only book published this year that will outlive the century," this is a brilliant of the idea that there are ...

Civil society initiatives played a key role in the increasing academic focus on poverty in mid-1960s Europe. The first generation of academic poverty researchers were able to draw on the expertise of civil society actors who, since the 1950s, had been carrying out their own research to counter a lack of scholarly interest. While the ‘rediscovery’ of poverty as a research topic in academic circles has received scholarly attention, the research efforts of their non-academic counterparts have been (...) overlooked. Building on recent work in the history of knowledge, this article focuses on poverty-related research in Belgium by both academic and non-academic knowledge producers. We assess whether and how both types of knowledge co-existed and possibly interacted. We also demonstrate how, due to a lack of academic interest in the 1950s, research on poverty in Belgium became crucial for civil society actors. From the mid-1960s onwards, the renewed academic interest in poverty facilitated interactions between established civil society researchers and academic scholars, but these interactions were complicated by a growing divergence in methods and goals. Through the lens of poverty, this article expands on our understanding of the development of research in the social sciences. (shrink)

Do we have positive duties to help others in need or are our moral duties only negative, focused on not harming them? Are any of the former positive duties, duties of justice that respond to enforceable rights? Is their scope global? Should we aim for global equality besides the eradication of severe global poverty? Is a humanist approach to egalitarian distribution based on rights that all human beings as such have defensible, or must egalitarian distribution be seen in an (...) associativist way, as tracking existing frameworks such as statehood and economic interdependence? Are the eradication of global poverty and the achievement of global equality practically feasible or are they hopelessly utopian wishes? -/- This book argues that there are basic positive duties of justice to help eradicate severe global poverty; that global egalitarian principles are also reasonable even if they cannot be fully realized in the short term; and that there are dynamic duties to enhance the feasibility of the transition from global poverty to global equality in the face of nonideal circumstances such as the absence of robust international institutions and the lack of a strong ethos of cosmopolitan solidarity. The very notion of feasibility is crucial for normative reasoning, but has received little explicit philosophical discussion. This book offers a systematic exploration of that concept as well as of its application to global justice. It also arbitrates the current debate between humanist and associativist accounts of the scope of distributive justice. Drawing on moral contractualism (the view that we ought to follow the principles that no one could reasonably reject), this book provides a novel defense of humanism, challenges several versions of associativism (which remains the most popular view among political philosophers), and seeks to integrate the insights underlying both views. (shrink)

First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

World history suffers from a paucity of clearly articulated, convincing explanations. While the rise of postmodernism and challenges to Eurocentrism did lead to some important correctives, the pendulum has swung too far the other direction, with a corresponding danger of 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'. We need careful, theoretically informed debates about ways of organizing world history. What constitutes a good historical explanation? What should guide historians to choose relevant facts? Which theoretical schools could be made useful, and (...) to what ends? These questions are especially relevant to the main topic of this book: the 'great divergence' between the west and the rest of the world, and how this historical rupture is to be explained. The book provides extensive critical analyses of some of the key claims in world history, analyzing their strengths as well as their major weaknesses--too often rooted in insufficient familiarity of historians with theories they discard. It also historicizes the field and the debates to partly account for what caused some theories to become more influential and others to fall into oblivion--despite the fact that the more influential frameworks are seriously flawed and some of the more marginalized ideas are more coherent and plausible. The book offers insights regarding the theoretical and political relevance of older debates about the transition to capitalism and historical materialism. Three major schools of thought in world history are critically examined through an in-depth theoretical and comparative analysis that has not been undertaken elsewhere: the so-called 'California School', World Systems Analysis, and Marxist theories of history, capitalism, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Murphy argues that, despite some of the more recent criticisms of older approaches to world history, the older theories remain indispensable for the writing of world history and for coming to terms with issues of global poverty, inequality and eco-catastrophe. (shrink)

T s kuhn's theory is full of conspicuous flaws for all the immense popularity of his very thin book (perhaps because of it?) such that, however dubious, it has become a "paradigm" itself for an enormous number of (equally dubious) papers. pointed out in no uncertain terms here are then only two of its many "flaws": kuhn's unawareness of committing his cardinal sin of "historical circularity" (between his philosophy and history of science), and, because of this unawareness, his utterly a- (...) or un-historical "understanding ("verstehen")" of the actual history of max planck ("wie es eigentlich gewesen ist"). (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a counter-productive tendency for many feminist critiques of patriarchy to revert to the same impoverished conception of power that they are critiquing, and thus—despite a commitment to the idea of a social self—inadvertently to valorize the notions of independence, autonomy, and choice that are enshrined in the ideal of the patriarchal individual. An adequate account of power relations between men and women cannot be rendered if we employ a misplaced and reductive model of power, (...) nor if we fail to acknowledge the intersubjective and interdependent nature of human self-consciousness—the deep and varied ways in which our identity and agency are intricately interwoven and wax or wane as a whole. Rightly understood, men are not as powerful and autonomous, nor women as powerless and oppressed, as they seem when viewed through the distorting lens provided by modern liberal individualism. (shrink)

The attacks on historicism by radical individualists such as Popper and Mises have had lasting repercussions in the social sciences. Specifically, the term is used to connote deterministic, teleological theories of history, associated with Hegelian notions of destiny and positivist ideas of historical laws. This article argues that historicism is very different in character, in that it essentially amounts to the belief that social science and history are one and the same, whilst emphasizing the separate epis temology of natural science. (...) It rejects the fictitious historicism invented by Popper in his famous polemic, and challenges the idea of a value- free social science posited by Mises, who saw history and human action as logically distinct entities. In conclusion, it is argued that the mecha nistic rationalism that characterizes much of social science, particularly modern economics, should be supplementary, if anything, to the primacy of history. The notion of transcendent, value-free criteria upon which to construct social science is refuted. (shrink)

This book is an important effort to fill a notable void in moral and political philosophy, for there has been, according to Sharon K. Vaughan, “no formal study of the treatment of poverty in Western political thought” . Vaughan attempts to rectify this with a survey of the views of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Mill, de Tocqueville, Hegel, Marx, Rawls, and Nozick on the subject of poverty, the poor, the redistribution of wealth, and justice. Her effort (...) is valuable, even if more work remains to be done.The time is well chosen for Vaughan’s undertaking, both because of the resurgence of political philosophy in the past forty years and also because of a more recent interest in the relationship between the empirical sciences and philosophy. An account of poverty, and a philosophical theory of how to respond to poverty, are clearly of importance to the justice project, central to contemporary political philosophy; but it is unlikely to be carried out well without attention to empirical details concerning the sources of poverty, the demographics of the poor, analyses of programs that have, and have not, been effectively used in the past, and the like. As Daniel Shapiro has recently shown in Is the. (shrink)

This essay seeks to accomplish three things: First, to examine Nietzsche’s critique of the “subject” in modern philosophy, with particular reference to Descartes.Second, to present an interpretation of Nietzsche’s alternative conception of “the subject as multiplicity.” And third, to argue that, for Nietzsche, this account of the “subject” as multiplicity does not lead to a kind of atomistic or anarchic view of the “subject,” contrary to what is often supposed. The essay focuses in particular on a number of aphorisms from (...) The Will to Power that articulate most forcefully Nietzsche’s critique of Cartesian subjectivity and its aftermath. Thinking, as interpretation, Nietzsche suggests, is an activity undertaken not by a unitary “subject” that is conscious of itself, but by a much more subtle, largely concealed, and complex interplay of drives as forces of domination that together constitute the phenomenon of the living body. (shrink)

There are cases where we think that poor offenders should not be held criminally responsible or punished to the same extent as non-poor (and, a fortiori, privileged) ones. Despite sharing this judgment, philosophers have offered different accounts of why or how poverty matters for criminal responsibility or penal judgments. In this paper, I present a new account of how poverty matters for criminal responsibility and corresponding penal judgments. The crux of the argument is this: a reasonable person who (...) is trapped in poverty can be (and sometimes is) provoked to offend following reasonable emotional reactions prompted by how that person is treated while in poverty. Call this the provocation view. I discuss how this view applies to some of the cases where poor citizens offend, address some objections against it, and briefly explain why provocation aims to supplement, rather than supplant or subsume other normative accounts which argue that poor offenders are (or should be held) less criminally responsible or be punished more leniently than non-poor ones. (shrink)

The article dwells on the history of the formation of multiple stigmas of sick/poor people. The author describes medical and status characteristics that predetermine attitudes towards potential or real carriers of infectious diseases and poverty. Historical examples of the stigmatization of certain social groups in the era of the greatest epidemiological trouble until the middle of the 19th century are described.A content analysis of the discourse is carried out. It was based on the materials of a modern online publication (...) and included text-analyzes of the audience’ comments (n=133) to the news. The publication describes a conflict in a city cafe about the visitor who carries multiple stigmas. Statements that reflect the assessment of the identity of the stigmatized and the attitude of the audience towards him are given.Historical and cultural analysis made it possible to identify the continuity of discursive practices of stigmatization, the relevance for contemporaries of the historically established stereotypes of perception of a traditionally stigmatized category. (shrink)

The problem of poverty and the emergence of a rabble (Pöbel) in modern society does not find any reasonable solution in Hegel's Philosophy of Right (henceforth PR). Some scholars have stressed how unusual this is for Hegel, claiming that it would have been uncharacteristic for him to leave a major, acknowledged problem of his system unsolved: "On no other occasion does Hegel leave a problem at that." The importance of this problem is not limited to the threat it poses (...) to the sphere of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). It also pertains to some central issues in Hegel's philosophy of history and the role he assigns to philosophy and philosophers in the making of history. In the present paper, I have three objectives. First, I will point out some bold, radical claims in Hegel’s discussion of poverty and examine the way he restrains them. Second, in contrast to the common view which holds that Marx ignores Hegel’s discussion of poverty in the PR, I will point to one of Marx’s early works which clearly refers to this discussion and in fact makes an intriguing use of Hegel’s claims by uncovering their radical elements and setting them free. Finally, I will argue that the deep reason for Hegel’s avoidance of social radicalism lies in his philosophy of history. The last point will also serve to explain Hegel’s willingness to leave the problem of poverty unsolved. I will begin however, with a short summary of Hegel’s discussion of poverty. (shrink)

The problem of poverty is global in scope and has devastating consequences for many essential aspects of life: health, education, political participation, autonomy, and psychological well-being. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty presents the current state of philosophical research on poverty in its breadth and depth. It features 39 chapters divided into five thematic sections: Concepts, theories and philosophical aspects of poverty research Poverty in the history of Western philosophy and philosophical traditions Poverty (...) in non-Western philosophical thought Key ethical concepts and poverty Social and political issues The handbook not only addresses questions concerning individual, collective, or institutional responsibility towards people in extreme poverty and the moral wrong of poverty, but it also tackles emerging applied issues that are connected to poverty such as gender, race, education, migration, and climate change. Additionally, it features perspectives on poverty from the history of Western philosophy, as well as non-Western views that explore issues unique to the Global South. Finally, the first section of essays provides an overview of the most important aspects of social science poverty research, which serves as an excellent resource for philosophers and philosophy students unfamiliar with how poverty is empirically researched in practice. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty is an essential resource for students and researchers in philosophy, political science, sociology, development studies, and public policy who are working on poverty. (shrink)

Malaysia is a multi-ethnic religious country with a population of 28.5 million, it is characterised by mainly three ethnic groups-Malay and indigenous people, Chinese, and Indians. Ever since independence in 1957, Malaysia has successfully transformed itself from a poor country into a middle-income nation. The Malaysian economy has seen a periodic growth despite challenging external factors. It can also definitely claim its success of combat against poverty. Despite its poverty reduction success, there still remains a vulnerable group of (...) people in the country experiencing poverty for some geographical and societal reasons. This concept paper has several objectives: A brief description of the country’s nature of poverty, poverty reduction policies and programs, and an analysis facing the challenges and recommendations for a sustainable poverty reduction in Malaysia. (shrink)

The persistence of poverty is one of the great problems of our times. In this paper I want to show how we can use Michel Foucault’s work to recast thisproblem through a genealogy of the political rationality within which it appears. Foucault’s genealogies present us with at least three irreducible experiences of poverty: 1) the philosophical care of the self where poverty is a goal to be attained; 2) the religious sacralization of the poor and charity; and (...) 3) the bio-political project in which poverty is a social disease to be cured or purged or a resource to be exploited. Foucault offers us the hope of resisting the danger of bio-politics, the cynical logic that stigmatizes the poor for their poverty and places them in apparatuses that treat them like a social disease, a moral failure, or a subhuman form of life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The role of the Catholic Church as conservative watchdog in the ‘culture wars’ of the 1970s and 1980s, with regards to issues of contraception, abortion and divorce, has perhaps obscured its more complicated stance on social issues. This article focuses on a significant shift in thinking with regards to the unacceptability of poverty and the role of the state in welfare provision in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that in Ireland Catholic ideas, given a public platform by (...) the Second Vatican Council, had a significant impact on clerics and people, creating social justice agendas that could both influence government policy and inspire its critique. While obviously not solely responsible for the shift to the left that occurs in this period, this article highlights the significance of Catholic ideas in shaping attitudes to poverty and welfare in the Irish context. Reflecting on the longer history on the role of Catholic ideas in Irish society, this article concludes with the suggestion that the frequent alignment of the institutional Church and successive governments in many areas implies the need for further analysis of the influence of class interests in determining policy and shaping attitudes, interests which transcend the lens of church versus state. (shrink)

This essay develops a naturalist framework based on Hume, Darwin, and Wittgenstein against postmodernist constructivism. That framework claims universal features of human biology, cognition, and behavior to explain our cultural histories, running contrary to two core constructivist doctrines of postmodernist scholarship: mutual opacity and epistemic violence. Mutual opacity posits the incommensurability of systems rooted in differing contexts, cultures, and group identities, while epistemic violence morally impugns the extension of the knowledge claims of any such system beyond its strictly localized boundaries. (...) This is the extension that universalist approaches, like naturalism, are recriminated against owing to their claims to discover encompassing standpoint‐independent and transcultural features of human constitution and modes of life. Comparative evaluation of these approaches exposes the failure of postmodernist constructivism to explain parallel practices, conventions, and institutions across human cultural histories, which universalist naturalism succeeds at, while moreover revealing how this failure undermines its agendas of social justice. (shrink)

Recently, William Desmond’s metaxological philosophy has been gaining popularity since it proposes a powerful counterweight to the dominance of deconstruction in certain areas of contemporary philosophy of religion. This paper serves to introduce Desmond’s philosophy and confront it with one specific form of Postmodern theology, namely John Caputo’s “weak theology.” Since Desmond’s philosophy is—while thought-provoking and refreshing—not well known, a substantial part of this paper is devoted to fleshing out its central concepts: perplexity, metaxology, and hyperbolic indirection. Afterwards, I argue (...) for the advantages of a metaphysical (Desmond) over a deconstructive (Caputo) approach to philosophy of religion/God. (shrink)

Since the beginning of human civilization, the interpretation of the meaning of poverty has always reflected the unique historical characteristics of each era. From the interpretation in moral perspective in early ancient age to the analysis by classical political economists who focus on economy, it was not until Marx’s revelation of the underlying motivation for the development of the history that the course of poverty has been found. Nowadays, the researching progress on poverty has been enriched by (...) contemporary researchers who have used Marx’s theory of poverty as the starting point and interpreted poverty in multiple dimensions. The dilemma is that, despite the improvement of basic material conditions, poverty has not been decreased, which requires for an institutional reflection that transcends the level of production. In addressing this major “obstacle” to social development, China, guided by the Marxism theory of poverty, has not only demonstrated to humanity its Chinese wisdom in dealing with poverty but has also highlighted the institutional advantages of socialism. Thus, it has become a crucial practical example of the eradication and reduction of poverty worldwide. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical inquiry into historical meaning and narrative understanding. Interpreting selected writings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and stories of Kafka, Rilke, Sartre, and Camus, the author defends the narrative coherence of life and the irreducibility of narrative understanding and truth. The island imagery uncovered in these authors provides the parameters for a contemporary philosophy of history properly mingling earth and sky as natality and mortality, remembering and forgetting, wandering and homecoming, waking and dreaming, wealth and poverty. (...) Johnson has pushed the life-world theme of Husserl's phenomenology out toward the wild-flowering world where it seems to have been headed. (shrink)

In opposition to any notion of poverty as privation, or ‘bare life’, Negrian discourse poses the problem of poverty as a precondition for innovation and self-constitution, that is, for the critical appropriation of the immeasurable. This appropriation, as depicted in Kairòs, Alma Venus, and Multitudo, occurs in the event of adequation, when the monstrous store of potentia (immanent to poverty) exposes itself to the void in the projection of the ‘to-come’. This essay seeks in turn to resolve (...) a series of vexing questions and problems concerning the function of poverty, love, and the monstrous in the Negrian constitution of reality. (shrink)

Popper's use of the word "'historicism" is too encompassing. Does "historicism" refer to a theory of the social sciences, a way of doing them, or a "'well-considered and close-knit philosophy?" Here the term is taken to mean a theory about the aims of the social sciences. But even with reference to his other works, Popper's argument proves not to be against historicism as he defined it, but rather against one of the other varieties of Historismus. Nor does the doctrine involve (...) or entail much that Popper seems to think it does. Notwithstanding this critique, Popper has sketched a number of arguments which might be further developed into a refutation of 11 (evolutionary historicism.". (shrink)

How and why did experience and knowledge become separated? Is it possible to talk of an infancy of experience, a "dumb" experience? For Walter Benjamin, the "poverty of experience" was a characteristic of modernity, originating in the catastrophe of the First World War. For Giorgio Agamben, the Italian editor of Benjamin's complete works, the destruction of experience no longer needs catastrophes: daily life in any modern city will suffice. Agamben's profound and radical exploration of language, infancy, and everyday life (...) traces concepts of experience through Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Benveniste. In doing so he elaborates a theory of infancy that throws new light on a number of major themes in contemporary thought: the anthropological opposition between nature and culture; the linguistic opposition between speech and language; the birth of the subject and the appearance of the unconscious. Agamben goes on to consider time and history; the Marxist notion of base and superstructure (via a careful reading of the famous Adorno–Benjamin correspondence on Baudelaire's Paris); and the difference between rituals and games. Beautifully written, erudite and provocative, these essays will be of great interest to students of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology and politics. (shrink)

The contradictions between food poverty affecting a large section of the global population and the everyday wastage of food, particularly in high income countries, have raised significant academic and public attention. All actors in the food chain have a role to play in food waste prevention and reduction, including farmers, food manufacturers and processors, caterers and retailers and ultimately consumers. Food surplus redistribution is considered by many as a partial solution to food waste reduction and food poverty mitigation, (...) while others criticize charitable initiatives as inadequate responses, that inhibit governments from responsibly protecting the citizens right to food. This paper frames food assistance as “hybrid systems”, situating at the intersection of territorial food, public welfare and third sector voluntary systems. Based on available literature and reflections on previous research examining food banks in Italy, we develop a system dynamics conceptual mapping. The aim is to model a set of relations and dynamic mechanisms associated with variables relevant to food waste generation, food recovery for social purposes and food poverty alleviation. The analysis of feedback interactions highlights the vulnerabilities of food assistance systems that occur when addressing food poverty by reducing food surplus. In summary, as the awareness on food poverty and food surplus arises, incentives to food recovery and redistribution strengthen the role of food assistance actors, increasing their exposure to drivers of change, such as retailers’ standards for food surplus prevention. This paper contributes to the current academic debate on charitable food assistance, with insights for policy makers and other systems’ actors. (shrink)