2.3: The capability approach versus capability theories

The above preliminary definition highlights that the capability approach is an open-ended and underspecified framework, which can be used for multiple purposes. It is open-ended because the general capability approach can be developed in a range of different directions, with different purposes, and it is underspecified because additional specifications are needed before the capability approach can become effective for a particular purpose — especially if we want it to be normative (whether evaluative or prescriptive). As a consequence, ‘the capability approach’ itself is an open, general idea, but there are many different ways to ‘close’ or ‘specify’ this notion. What is needed for this specifying or closing of the capability approach will depend on the aim of using the approach, e.g. whether we want to develop it into a (partial) theory of justice, or use it to assess inequality, or conceptualise development, or use it for some other purpose.

This distinction between the general, open, underspecified capability approach, and its particular use for specific purposes is absolutely crucial if we want to understand it properly. In order to highlight that distinction, but also to make it easier for us to be clear when we are talking about the general, open, underspecified capability approach, and when we are talking about a particular use for specific purposes, I propose that we use two different terms (Robeyns 2016b, 398). Let us use the term ‘the capability approach’ for the general, open, underspecified approach, and let us employ the term ‘a capability theory’ or ‘a capability analysis, capability account or capability application’ for a specific use of the capability approach, that is, for a use that has a specific goal, such as measuring poverty and deriving some policy prescriptions, or developing a capabilitarian cost-benefit analysis, or theorising about human rights, or developing a theory of social justice. In order to improve readability, I will speak in what follows of ‘a capability theory’ as a short-hand for ‘a capability account, or capability application, or capability theory’.¹⁴

One reason why this distinction between ‘capability approach’ and ‘capability theory’ is so important, is that many theories with which the capability approach has been compared over time are specific theories, not general open frameworks. For example, John Rawls’s famous theory of justice is not a general approach but rather a specific theory of institutional justice (Rawls 2009), and this has made the comparison with the capability approach at best difficult (Robeyns 2008b). The appropriate comparison would be Rawls’s theory of justice with a properly developed capability theory of justice, such as Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice (Nussbaum 2006b), but not Rawls’s theory of justice with the (general) capability approach.

Another reason why the distinction between ‘capability approach’ and ‘capability theory’ is important, is that it can help provide an answer to the “number of authors [who] ‘complain’ that the capability approach does not address questions they put to it” (Alkire 2005, 123). That complaint is misguided, since the capability approach cannot, by its very nature, answer all the questions that should instead be put to particular capability theories. For example, it is a mistake to criticise Amartya Sen because he has not drawn up a specific list of relevant functionings in his capability approach; that critique would only have bite if Sen were to develop a particular capability theory or capability application where the selection of functionings is a requirement.¹⁵

In short, there is one capability approach and there are many capability theories, and keeping that distinction sharply in mind should clear up many misunderstandings in the literature.

However, if we accept the distinction between capability theories and the capability approach, it raises the question of what these different capability theories have in common. Before addressing that issue, I first want to present a bottom-up description of the many modes in which capability analyses have been conducted. This will give us a better sense of what the capability approach has been used for, and what it can do for us.

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14 I kindly request readers who are primarily interested in the capability approach for policy design and (empirical) applications to read ‘capability application’ every time the term ‘capability theory’ is used.

15 Yet even for capability theories, it is unlikely that Sen would agree that he has to draw up a list of capabilities, since he is a proponent of a procedural method for selecting capabilities. At the beginning of this century, there was a fierce discussion in the capability literature about whether it was a valid critique of Sen’s work that it lacked a specific list (Nussbaum 2003a; Robeyns 2003; Sen 2004a; Qizilbash 2005). Luckily that debate seems to be settled now. For an overview of the different ways in which dimensions can be selected in the capability approach, see section 2.7.2.