Corresponding author: Ilcheong Yi, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Palais des Nations, 1211, Geneva 10, Switzerland Email: yi@unrisd.org Combating poverty and inequality through social policies: Reflections on the UNRISD report Sarah Cook and Ilcheong Yi United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Switzerland Poverty has returned to the centre of academic and policy discourse in the development field since the late 1990s. After being marginalized in the previous decade, when a reduc- tion in poverty was viewed as an eventual outcome of structural adjustment policies to promote market-led growth, a new global consensus emerged at the turn of the millen- nium, with unprecedented mobilization around the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Despite the renewed focus on poverty – reflected for example in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) of the IMF and World Bank, as well as the MDGs – progress towards its reduction has been highly uneven and subject to reversals. Moreover, inequal- ity has remained a neglected policy issue: for much of this period, growth was deemed sufficient to alleviate poverty; addressing inequality, it was argued, would compromise growth; what happened at the top end of the distribution was not therefore an issue of policy concern (Bangura, 2011). Interventions instead focused on tackling the extremes of poverty, with little, if any, concern for rising inequalities either within or between countries. However, as the 2010 UNRISD report Combating Poverty and Inequality: