Entitlement Failure?

Abstract

In this article, the literature around the entitlement approach to famine is assessed against the background of recent developments in economics which are perceived to have increasingly encroached upon the previously neglected subject matter of the other social sciences. In this light, emphasis is given to the tension that exists in the entitlement approach between its micro‐foundations and macro‐consequences and causes. This, in turn, is related to the broader problem in social theory of the relations between structures and agency. Whilst it is found that the entitlement approach does embody an implicit causal content in the filtering of socioeconomic mechanisms through the distribution of individual entitlements, it is ultimately argued that the approach is primarily suited to investigative rather than causal analysis.