This chapter presents the theoretical and ethical premises of the PAP. It starts with a discussion of what it means to think paradigmatically and continues with a detailed presentation of three paradigms: the conservative, the structural and the PAP. The first two are the dominant paradigms in the field, and they are compared with the third, which I am suggesting. The conservative paradigm, I claim, essentialises people in poverty as Others. Through its focus on the weaknesses and deficits of individuals as the cause of their poverty, it inspires direct practice that aims at changing the characteristics of individuals. Contrastingly, the structural paradigm sees societal failures as the cause of poverty, recommending a politics of redistribution as the solution to poverty. The structural paradigm has had a great influence on macro-practice but much less so on direct practice. Building on the structural analysis, the PAP adds to it the concept of recognition – derived from current relational psychoanalysis – in order to offer a detailed blueprint for direct practice. The three paradigms have strong links of mutual influence between practice and theory.

Introduction

Asking about the reason for people's poverty causes discomfort in those who call the Brazilian Catholic archbishop who inspired Latin America's ‘liberation theology’ a ‘communist’. Giving food does not evoke a similar response because it seems neutral, apolitical. However, every practice is, in fact, political. What makes the provision of food to the poor seem apolitical is not its essential nature, but its proximity to hegemonic ideas regarding what poverty is and what the ways to combat it are. There is no escape from being political; thinking through the framework of paradigms helps us to expose the political component of practice.

During the last two decades, social work scholars in the UK (Craig, 2002; Jones, 2002; Davis and Wainwright, 2005; Mantle and Backwith, 2010; Parrott, 2014; Cummins, 2018; Featherstone, 2016; Gupta et al, 2017), Belgium (Boone et al, 2018, 2019), the US (Deka, 2012; Reisch and Jani, 2012), New Zealand and Australia (Waldegrave, 2005; Beddoe and Keddell, 2016; Morley and Ablett, 2017), and Israel (Rosenfeld, 1993; Rosenfeld and Tardieu, 2000; Strier, 2009;