1.1: Why the capability approach?

Many people who encounter the capability approach for the first time find the ideas embedded within it intuitively attractive. The basic claim of the capability approach is that, when asking normative questions, we should ask what people are able to do and what lives they are able to lead. That claim resonates with widespread ideas among citizens, academics, and politicians about how to make policies, views about what social justice requires, or bottom-up views about development and social progress. Perhaps the most important contribution the capability approach makes is to prompt us to ask alternative questions, and to focus on different dimensions when we make observations or when we gather the relevant data for making evaluations or judgements.

What is the capability approach? This book will answer that question in detail. But let us start with a first, preliminary description, taken from a quote by Amartya Sen, who introduced the theoretical idea of the capability approach in his 1979 Tanner Lecture (Sen 1980a) and soon after in empirical work (Sen and Sengupta 1983; Sen 1985a). According to Sen, the capability approach “is an intellectual discipline that gives a central role to the evaluation of a person’s achievements and freedoms in terms of his or her actual ability to do the different things a person has reason to value doing or being” (Sen 2009a, 16). As we will see later in this book, I will propose a definition and an account of the capability approach that does not exactly equal Sen’s but rather can be interpreted as a generalisation of Sen’s definition.¹ Yet Sen’s definition is a good way to start, since it highlights that the capability approach is concerned with aspects of people’s lives such as their health, the education they can enjoy and the support they enjoy from their social networks; it is also concerned with what people can do, such as being able to work, raise a family, travel, or be politically active. The capability approach cares about people’s real freedoms to do these things, and the level of wellbeing that they will reach when choosing from the options open to them. It is a rich, multidimensional approach.

Here’s an example illustrating the difference the capability approach makes. Everyone agrees that poverty needs to be combatted — but who are the people that suffer from poverty? Which conceptual and normative framework do we use when we identify the poor? Which definition of poverty do we use when we analyse the incidence of poverty in a country? As empirical research has shown, it does matter whether one uses the widespread income-based metric, or whether one takes a capability perspective and focuses on a set of thresholds of basic functionings, the lack of which indicates a dimension of poverty. Caterina Ruggeri Laderchi (1997) used data from a Chilean household survey to investigate the extent to which an income-based measure is able to capture some basic functionings that could arguably be seen as central to poverty analysis: basic education, health and nutrition. She found that the income variable in itself is insignificant as a determinant of the shortfall in health, schooling and child nutrition and that the role that income plays is highly non-linear and depends on a number of other personal, household and regional characteristics. In other words, looking at the income level in a household to determine whether the members of that household are poor may be an unreliable indicator for the prevalence of poverty. The difference between, on the one hand, the income-based measurements and, on the other hand, measurements based on a selection of basic indicators that reflect how people are doing has also been confirmed by a large number of other studies in the last twenty-five years.² It is for that income-based approach that the capability approach offers an alternative — but, as will be explained in this book, it is also an alternative to many other approaches and theories, such as the happiness approach or resources-based theories of justice.

While the capability approach has been used to identify the poor, it has also been used for many other purposes. Over the last twenty-five years, the range of fields in which the capability approach has been applied and developed has expanded dramatically, and now includes global public health, development ethics, environmental protection and ecological sustainability, education, technological design, welfare state policies and many, many more.³ Nor has the use of the capability approach been restricted to empirical research only. Some of its purposes have been theoretical, such as the construction of theories of justice (Anderson 1999; Nussbaum 2000; Nussbaum 2006b; Claassen 2016), or the development of a riches-line, which allows us to identify the rich (Robeyns 2017b). Other uses of the capability approach have combined theoretical and empirical research, such as Jonathan Wolff and Avner De-Shalit’s (2007) study of disadvantage.

For all these endeavours, the capability approach asks: What are people really able to do and what kind of person are they able to be? It asks what people can do and be (their capabilities) and what they are actually achieving in terms of beings and doings (their functionings). Do the envisioned institutions, practices and policies focus on people’s capabilities, that is, their opportunities to do what they value and be the kind of person they want to be? Do people have the same capabilities in life?⁴ Or do global economic structures, domestic policies or brute bad luck make people’s capabilities unequal, and if so, is that unfair and should we do something about that? Do development projects focus on expanding people’s capabilities, or do they have another public policy goal (such as economic growth), or are they merely serving the interests of a dominant group? The capability approach thus offers a different perspective than alternative approaches that focus on the accumulation of material resources, or the mental states of people, such as their overall satisfaction with their lives.

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1 The exact definition and description of the capability approach that I will develop in this book is broader than Sen’s own. The reason, as will become clear in due course, is that the “having reason to value” clause in Sen’s definition is, in my view, a special case of the general definition of the capability approach.

2 See, among others, Klasen 2000; Laderchi, Saith and Stewart 2003; Qizilbash 2002; Reddy, Visaria and Asali 2009; Alkire et al. 2015.

3 See section 1.4 for a more detailed discussion of the scope of the capability approach, and some references to the various fields in which it is now applied and developed.

4 Some capability scholars, in particular Martha Nussbaum, have extended the capability approach to include the functionings of non-human animals. In this book, I restrict the discussion to human functionings and human capabilities. This is not to deny that the functionings of non-human animals are important, nor that for some ethical questions we need to consider both humans and non-human animals. There is a literature that analyses whether the capability approach can plausibly be extended to include non-human animals, which will not be discussed here, given the focus on humans (e.g. Nussbaum 2006b; Schinkel 2008; Cripps 2010; Wissenburg 2011; Holland and Linch 2016). Note that there is also a large literature on ‘the capabilities of firms’, which is not related to how the term ‘capabilities’ is used in the capability approach. In this book, the term ‘capabilities’ refers only to the capabilities of members of the human species.