This project seeks to understand the relationship between spatial poverty traps and chronic poverty, and to suggest policy interventions to address spatial poverty traps. The first phase of the project centred around an international workshop which drew together four main audiences: researchers; civil society organisations; donor organisations and southern Governments. Its aim was to consolidate lessons from recent analytical work on the drivers of poverty and chronic poverty in ‘spatial poverty traps’ and to review experience from government and civil society policy experiments in such areas. The workshop was separated into 2 broad thematic areas (1) Spatial poverty traps – characteristics, challenges, association (or otherwise) with persistent (& chronic) poverty, and (2) Policy and programmatic responses – donors, government, civil society (3 parallel sessions). The second phase of the project is taking the papers presented at the workshop, commission a number of additional papers, and produce a joint ODI/Chronic Poverty Research Centre working paper series. It is anticipated that the working paper series will be published in September/October 2008.