Amartya Sen's development of an entitlement approach to understanding
famines in the early 1980s provided one important stimulus for new thinking
in this area of study. While there were important predecessor studies in
economic and social anthropology and in the development administration
literature, the entitlement approach provided a well-organised way of
thinking through the detail of the dynamics of famines and why some people
die while others do not. The difference, argued Sen, was explained by
people’s ability to translate – or not - endowments into entitlements in
respect of food. Thus, according to Sen’s analysis in the Ethiopian famine of
1973, pastoralists were particularly badly affected not only by their animals
dying from a lack of food and water but the interplay of this with a relative
decline in the market value of their livestock in respect of other foodstuffs. In
the Bengal famine of 1943, fishing households were particularly affected as
the value of their entitlements declined in relation to the price of grain and
rice. The notion of entitlement encompassed what people were able to
produce, what they were able to exchange and what they were able to claim
in other ways. This type of approach shifted analysis beyond a narrow focus
on income and the material resources people owned, towards the
investigation of how they secured access to what they need. In doing so it
extended our imagination about the types of resources that might be
deployed and the strategies that might be adopted to realise entitlements.