Towards an understanding of the light scalar mesons

Although studied for many years the nature of the light scalar mesons remains controversial. Here we shall present a method, applicable for s-wave states located close to a threshold, that allows one to quantify the molecular part of a given state. When applied to the $f_0(980)$ a dominance of the molecular component is found. In the second part we show that requirements of field theoretic consistency and chiral symmetry, when applied to the scattering of light pseudo--scalars, naturally lead to the appearance of dynamical poles in the scalar sector. A program is proposed on how to further investigate experimentally the mixing between these dynamical states and possible genuine quark states.