Achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by half will require taking action simultaneously on two separate fronts. It will require helping poor people make an escape out of poverty. It will also call for stemming the flow of people into poverty. Descents into poverty have occurred alongside escapes in every one of the forty Peruvian communities investigated here. Different reasons are related, respectively with escapes and with descents. Making progress in poverty reduction will require accelerating escapes while simultaneously slowing down descents. Different policies will be required to serve these two separate purposes.

Research on Climate Variability and Household Welfare in the Andes was funded by the Human Dimensions Program of NOAA to study the livelihood strategies of rural families in agropastoral systems of the highlands (above 3,700 m above sea level). The purpose of this research was to understand how families cope and adapt to climate variability, and

Achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty will require simultaneous action on two separate fronts: helping poor people escape from poverty, and stemming the flow of people into poverty. This article examines forty Peruvian communities, and finds that descents into poverty have occurred alongside escapes in every one of them. Escape and descent are asymmetric in terms of reasons: while one set of reasons is responsible for escapes from poverty, another and different set of reasons is associated with descent. Making progress in poverty reduction will require measure to accelerate escapes whilst at the same time slowing down descents. The article looks at the different policies which will be required to serve these two separate purposes. The authors would like to thank the Pro-Poor Livestock Policy Initiative of FAO and Duke

This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 2014-current by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact

livestock-related research and development strategies and policies, not only in Peru, but in other regions where similar livelihood of the 1.7 million ‘extreme poor ’ live in highland rural areas, where poverty remains an intractable issue. While there is a considerable amount of literature on poverty little research has been done. This paper addresses these two knowledge gaps, present-ing a participatory poverty dynamics approach that exam-ines households ’ pathways into and out of poverty over the long run, applied to 40 rural Andean communities in two different regions of Peru. The approach offered a unique

this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies.