Clashes of Well-Being: a paper on the strangeness of a poverty reduction programme

The paper makes an ethnographic contribution to the discussion of what constitutes well-being by exploring how a government poverty reduction programme in Moroto Town, Uganda, came to be perceived as strange and even damaging to the people who benefitted from it. The programme sought to live up to standards of participation, conflict sensitivity and sustainability, but in practice it failed to provide change in people’s lives that they had reason to value. The paper follows a line of thought, which regards values as those actions one is most willing to invest energy in. It illuminates how the actions that the programme generated were actions that the beneficiaries contributed little value or no value, while it impeded the actions that were highly valued. The programme endangered people’s safety and challenged the social worth of the beneficiaries in the social lifeworld they valued being part of.