The referent of poverty in UN discourse on sustainable development

This article analyzes the creation of the meaning of "poverty" as perceived in the United Nations discourse on sustainable development. Our goal is to approach the representation of the process of poverty as constituted in this institutional arena. We propose an alternative analytical perspective to a descriptive statistics approach, emphasizing the discursive aspect of social processes. We begin this process with a route we call "endogenous dynamics" that addresses the discursive ties between the referent of "poverty" and the main referents of sustainable development. We affirm that the sustainable development model has surpassed the analogy between economic growth and development that was predominant during the second half of the last century. Nevertheless, this model has not addressed comprehensively the process of poverty: an in-depth review of its causes and an impartial approach are needed and attention must be paid to its social, economic and environmental dimensions.