Focussing on the psychosocial dimensions of poverty, the contention that shame lies at the ‘irreducible absolutist core’ of the idea of poverty is examined through qualitative research with adults and children experiencing poverty in diverse settings in seven countries: rural Uganda and India; urban China; Pakistan; South Korea and United Kingdom; and small town and urban Norway. Accounts of the lived experience of poverty were found to be very similar, despite massive disparities in material circumstances associated with locally defined poverty lines, suggesting that relative notions of poverty are an appropriate basis for international comparisons. Though socially and culturally nuanced, shame was found to be associated with poverty in each location, variably leading to pretence, withdrawal, self-loathing, ‘othering’, despair, depression, thoughts of suicide and generally to reductions in personal efficacy. While internally felt, poverty-related shame was equally imposed by the attitudes and behaviour of those not in poverty, framed by public discourse and influenced by the objectives and implementation of anti-poverty policy. The evidence appears to confirm the negative consequences of shame, implicates it as a factor in increasing the persistence of poverty and suggests important implications for the framing, design and delivery of anti-poverty policies.

Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field.

The paper examines the significance of politics in the rise of social assistance programmes in developing countries in the last decade. It finds this is a two-way process. Politics is crucial to the adoption, design and implementation of social assistance programmes. They also have a feedback effect on local and national politics. The paper develops a framework for distinguishing the different dimensions of influence. It applies this framework to study the development of social assistance in India, Brazil and South Africa. It employs a comparative perspective to identify key approaches, findings, and knowledge gaps in the politics of social assistance.

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Informal settlements (often called ‘slums’) seem to defy the realisation of social rights. The UN Special Rapporteurs, in their reports, present informal dwellers mostly as the victims of human rights violations. Informal dwellers are not merely victims, however; they also produce non‐state welfare through economic and social practices on the margins. Considering the human right to housing (as promise of social citizenship) and informal settlements, we discuss the ‘everyday social contract of informality’ that frames the production of non‐state welfare in densely populated urban areas in the global South. Planning theorists, by introducing ‘insurgent citizenship’, examine the potential of bottom‐up initiatives that claim the ‘right to the city’. Insurgent citizenship focuses on the enjoyment dimension of human rights. In this vein, we suggest that human rights cannot be implemented in informal settings without full consideration to the spatiality and sociality of non‐state welfare.