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The stories that we hear as we conduct development research or implement development projects are often relegated to the margins of development studies. This article argues that these stories require our attention, for they are windows on to indigenous narratives of development and our placement in those narratives. Examining these stories as efforts to emplot experiences of development and encounters with development professionals within particular narratives enables us to better understand our own positionality in the communities in which we work, and therefore better understand the opportunities and challenges that our research/interventions present to the emergence of a truly participatory development.

This article argues that the practice of poverty alleviation is greatly limited by a vision of poverty that fails to capture the locally specific causes of and solutions to the challenges that threaten human well-being. This problematic vision of poverty takes real-world form in such initiatives as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. It is a key reason why this and other contemporary poverty-alleviation efforts do not show greatly improved results compared with previous efforts. By reframing our understanding of the challenges to human well-being from poverty to ‘poverties’, however, we might envisage a new approach to policy development in relation to poverty that moves us towards a truly sustainable development.