Institute of Development Studies

The inter-generational transmission (IGT) of poverty is a well established conceptualisation of how poverty is reproduced over time. IGT has been a popular approach but as currently constructed it tends to be overly deterministic, and overly emphasise material assets. In contrast, 'wellbeing' is emerging as a complement to the more traditional ways of conceptualizing and measuring poverty and deprivation around material consumption. Wellbeing extends attention from what people can do and be and adds how people feel about what they can do and be. Wellbeing is thus explicitly rather than inferentially about agency and also goes beyond the material to consider the relational and the subjective domains of life. So, can a wellbeing lens help us to rethink IGT? We use an application to an IGT mechanism, transmission of undernutrition from one generation to the next.