Introduction to Civil Society Coalitions and Educational Advocacy

Abstract

In the book Poverty and Famines, Amartya Sen presents the main findings of the outstanding research he did on the causes and effects of world famines. One of the starting points of his research was observing that similar types of food crisis (in similar climate conditions, with similar bad crops) that happened in India and China in the fifties had very different consequences in the two countries: Three million people starved to death in China, while many less died in India. So, the driving question of Sen’s research was why did such big variations in the management of food crises in apparently two similar situations happen? (Sen 1983).