1 Maia Green, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester The Social Distribution of Sanctioned Harm: Thinking Through Chronic Poverty, Durable Poverty and Destitution: Published in D Hulme, T Addison and R Kanbur (eds) (2009) Poverty Dynamics, Oxford University Press, 309‐327. This chapter presents an anthropological take on the concept of chronic poverty. An anthropological approach places social construction at the centre of inquiry, considering how concepts come to inform the practice of those who are the subjects of study and the classificatory practices through which analysis is conducted. This reflexivity differentiates anthropology from other social sciences. Anthropological perspectives on the constitution of development categories not only provides a qualitative understanding of the social processes through which such classificatory systems come to have salience (Green 2007). In exposing how the social is constituted as a category of organisation and analysis, anthropology sheds light on the delineations of the social in other social sciences and hence on the explanatory limits of what is represented as social analysis (Green 2006). Chronic poverty is defined in the development literature as a state of deprivation of income, consumption or capacities lasting more than five years. Economistic conceptions of chronic poverty, whether based on income or consumption measures, are based on normative theories about growth and market engagement as the means through which escape from poverty is possible, except for the chronically poor. The paradigm attempts to identify the exceptions to the growth rule, that is to isolate and explain why some agents fail to escape poverty. As such when framed in terms of economics the chronic poverty concept relies ultimately on neo‐liberal characterisations of agency