Access Failure

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1970s, Josué de Castro and Amartya Sen showed that hunger and famine are not caused by mere food availability decline; indeed, during most modern times of hunger and famine, there was enough food for everyone. Food crises stem from maldistribution and well-functioning markets that allocate food away from the hungry. Sen shows that people cannot obtain enough food when their entitlements (legal means), made up of assets (land, labor, cash, stocks) and social protections (formal and informal networks of support), are inadequate—“entitlement failure.” Climate’s relation to crisis is now similarly misunderstood. Today, we often describe crises—hunger, famine, dislocation, or economic loss—as outcomes of climate change or extreme weather. Yet these crises are not caused by mere weather. The damage is enabled by the human vulnerabilities that weather finds in place. Building on Sen’s entitlements approach, this chapter explores, via a case of dangerous emigration from the Sahel toward Europe, how to identify the deep roots of crisis by starting with and tracing chains of causality from instances of “access failure”—moments in which people fail to access the necessities for security or for fulfilling their aspirations.