Structural and individualistic theories of poverty

This 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.