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The Entitlement Approach

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Contemporary Famine Analysis

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Political Science ((BRIEFSPOLITICAL))

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Abstract

Sen’s entitlement approach treats famines as socio-economic problems rather than food availability problems. The approach focuses on the set of alternative commodity bundles that can be acquired through legal channels of acquirement. Entitlement failures occur when it is no longer possible to acquire commodity bundles with enough food to survive. Hence, a famine need not occur because of lack of food but could be caused purely by distributional dynamics such as a rise in food prices, a fall in wages, a termination of state transfers, and so on. While the entitlement approach is a useful tool in a disaggregated impact analysis, several scholars have argued that the entitlement approach devotes insufficient analytical attention to issues of food production, legal structures and socio-political dimensions. The chapter discusses the analytical implications of this criticism, and makes the case for supplementing the entitlement approach with macro-level analyses of political dynamics.

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  1. Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

    Olivier Rubin

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Rubin, O. (2016). The Entitlement Approach. In: Contemporary Famine Analysis. SpringerBriefs in Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27306-8_4

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