researchers journalists and activists have an important job to do by challenging these frameworks so that currently unthinkable courses of public and private action capable of addressing chronic poverty can be openly debated so for example it may be unthinkable for policy makers in a particular countiy to provide a social protection floor for consumption because this is held to generate dependency and to be unaffordable the evidence from countries in the south shows that neither of these are true chapters and politics and the ways in which institutions work are usually at the heart of the problem of chronic poverty yet because the chronically poor rarely organise themselves to put pressure on politicians or the political system there is often little political motivation for change