Using Foucault' approach of public policies in terms of "police", this paper explores, in the case of Jordan, the political outreach of defining, measuring and acting upon poverty using UNDP's Human Development concept and indices. The paper analyses the 2004' Jordan Human Development Report (JHDR), which "places the poor at the centre of analysis and attempts to capture the diverse and dynamic characteristics of poverty through the eyes of the poor themselves", and addresses poverty as a lack of human development. Yet, in this case human development rather appears as an instrument of institutional reform attempting at "making up people", at engineering the moulding of a new society, globalised and market-led.
