Structural and individualistic theories of poverty

Abstract

AbstractThis paper clarifies and contrasts the explanatory mechanisms in individualistic and structural accounts of poverty. I argue that individualistic approaches obscure a great deal of the theoretical substance in the causal explanation of poverty, as they lack a macro‐level appraisal of the subject. Such arguments can explain why one person has a higher risk of poverty than another, but ignore the fact that a full account of poverty is not furnished by a simple adding up of all the separate individual‐level accounts. I also argue that there are in fact two separate macro‐level explanations of poverty: where macro‐structural explanations attempt to provide accounts of the “empty places” of poverty into which individuals get slotted, situational accounts attempt to explain the circumstances under which specific “poverty‐generating” behaviors arise. I conclude by providing a synthesis of individual and structural accounts of poverty, showing that while the two approaches need not be viewed as entirely antagonistic, the former should be accorded a far more modest role and indeed subsumed into broader structural accounts.