The Capabilities Approach

Origins

Over the last decade, Sen’s capabilities approach has emerged as one of the leading alternatives to mainstream economic thought on poverty, inequality, and human development. Beginning with his definition of basic capability equality presented in his Tanner Lecture ‘Equality of What?’, Sen has developed a framework directly concerned with human capabilities and functioning. Sen’s approach has strong connections with Adam Smith’s analysis of necessities and living conditions and Karl Marx’s concern with human freedom and emancipation. Later Sen also recognized the one of the most powerful conceptual connections relates to Aristotle’s theory of political distribution and his analysis of eudaimonia – human flourishing. While the roots of the capabilities can be traced as far back as Aristotle, Smith, and Marx, there are also more recent links. Sen often notes that Rawl’s Theory of Justice and its emphasis on self respect and access to primary goods has deeply influenced the capabilities approach. The capabilities approach probably has the most in common with the basic needs approach to development that was developed by Paul Streeten et al and Frances Stewart. Sen also compares and contrasts the capabilities approach with close rivals that concentrate on entitlements, the priority of liberty, human rights, and human capital. Through those comparisons he shows that while each approach has something to offer, only the capabilities approach is able to address all relevant concerns.

Conceptual Foundations

The conceptual foundations of the capabilities approach can be found in Sen’s critiques of traditional welfare economics in which well-being is conflated with opulence (income, commodity command) or utility (happiness). He begins by considering income or commodity command. Sen acknowledges that economic growth and expansion of goods and services are necessary for human development. However, he believes that wealth should not be considered the good that one seeks, but it is simply a means for gaining other useful things. The quality of life should be judged by considering what people can achieve. Sen observes that this different people and societies differ in their capacity to convert income and commodities into valuable achievements. In comparing the well-being of different people, not enough information is provided by looking only at the commodities each can successfully command. It is also important to consider how well people are able to function with the goods and services at their disposal.

Sen also challenges the welfare approach, which concentrates on happiness, pleasure, and desire-fulfillment. He points out that there is more to life than simply achieving utility. While it is important to recognize utility, there are other things of intrinsic value, such as rights and positive freedoms, which are neglected by the welfare approach.

These considerations are the basis for Sen’s conclusion that neither opulence nor utility adequately represents human well-being and deprivation. Instead, Sen calls for a more direct approach that focuses on human functionings and the capability to achieve valuable functionings. Sen makes the following distinctions:

• Functioniong – ‘A functioning is an achievement of a person: what she or he manages to do or be. It reflects, as it were, a part of the “state” of that person’ (Sen, 9 10, 1985). Achieving a functioning (e.g. being adequately nourished) with a given bundle of commodities (e.g. bread or rice) depends on a range of personal and social factors (e.g. metabolic rates, body size, age, gender, activity levels, etc.). A functioning therefore refers to the use a person makes of the commodities at his or her command.
• Capability – A capability reflects a person’s ability to achieve a given functioning (‘doing’ or ‘being’). For example, a person may have the ability to avoid hunger, but may choose to fast or go on hunger strike instead.
• Functioning n-tuple – A functioning n-tuple (or vector) describes the combination of ‘doings’ and ‘beings’ that constitute the state of a person’s life. The functioning n-tuple is given by the utilization of the available commodity bundle. Each functioning n-tuple represents a possible lifestyle.
• Capability Set – The capability set describes the set of attainable functioning n-tuples or vectors a person can achieve. It is likely that a person will be able to choose between different commodity bundles and utilizations. The capability set is obtained by applying all feasible utilizations to all attainable commodity bundles. This emphasizes that capabilities reflect a person’s real opportunities or positive freedom of choice between possible lifestyles.

Strengths

1. One of the main strengths of Sen’s framework is that it is flexible, so that researchers can develop and apply it in many different ways. Sen does not give a definitive list of capabilities because he argues that the selection and weighting of capabilities is based on personal value judgments. While he gives examples of intrinsically valuable capabilities such as being well nourished or able to read, he does not give a list of capabilities to be viewed as objectively correct.
2. Sen indicates that the capabilities approach can be used to assess individual advantage in a range of different spaces. For example, the assessment of poverty might involve concentrating on a small sub-set of basic capabilities as opposed to evaluating human development which would require ea longer list of capabilities. The focus of the approach can also be broadened to include ‘agency’, which recognizes that individuals often have goals and values that transcend and at times conflict with personal well-being. The approach can also be adjusted to focus on equality, social justice, living standards and rights and duties.
3. Sen does recognize that the capabilities approach is not sufficient for all evaluative purposes. By itself, the approach does not provide a complete theory of justice or development.

Criticisms

The capabilities approach has been criticized from several different angles. Critics often interpret key strengths as potential weaknesses, especially concerning the absence of the identification of specific capabilities. Other criticisms casts doubt on the usefulness of the approach for making inter-personal comparisons of well-being in the presence of potential disagreements about the valuation of capabilities including the relative weights to be assigned to these capabilities. The approach is also criticized because of the large quantity of information that it requires. Evaluating social states typically depends on acquiring data on multiple functionings where in some cases, those relevant social indicators are not available. Moving from functioning to capability is also complicated because it requires additional information on counterfactual choices as well as actual choices.

Works Cited

Clark, David A. The Capability Approach: Its Development, Critiques and Recent Advances.

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