Abstract The millennial ‘rediscovery’ of poverty as a global challenge, by the United Nations and other multilateral agencies, was accompanied by the (rather premature) announcement that a ‘global consensus’ had been established on the philosophy and policy of poverty alleviation. The paper presents a critical account of the origins and character of this global consensus on poverty alleviation, which is based on a family of supply‐side, ‘human‐capital’ approaches that incentivize risk‐taking, investment‐oriented behavior on the part of poor households. It concludes that such global models of poverty management represent more than carriers of best practices or conveyors of multilateral policy accords; they epitomize a form of ‘fast policy’ integration in which policy problems themselves are effectively redefined (or ‘reformatted’) through preconstituted strategies, with outcomes that nevertheless remain geographically uneven and deeply contradictory.
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