4.4: Why not use the notion of needs?

By introducing the concepts of ‘functionings’ and ‘capabilities’, the capability approach offers some specific notions of ‘advantage’ and provides an ethical framework to guide our actions and institutional design. It is also a theoretical framework with clear commitments to practice and policy making in the world as it is, not just in some hypothetical world or in a stylized model. However, the same can be said of the (basic) needs approach, which was introduced and developed much earlier in the landscape of ethical approaches related to wellbeing and poverty. Hence, the obvious question to ask is: why not use the notion of needs for our theoretical work, and the basic needs approach for work on development?

To answer that question, it makes sense to make a distinction between the basic needs approach as it has been used by development scholars and policy makers, and the philosophical theories of basic needs. Let us look at the basic needs approach first. This is a practice and policy oriented approach “that gives priority to meeting people’s basic needs — to ensuring that there are sufficiently, appropriately distributed basic need goods and services to sustain all human lives at a minimally decent level” (Stewart 2006, 14). The basic needs approach was a reaction to the development policies that many countries in the Global South pursued after independence from colonial rule, and that led to a dualistic pattern of development, with a small modern sector that allowed some people to flourish while at the same time leaving many other people in poverty and unemployment. The fundamental claim of the basic needs approach was that the poor not only need a monetary income but also some very basic goods and services such as clean water, enough food, health services, and education. Given the urgency of these needs, the hope was that the requirement to supply them would be more readily accepted by governments in both the Global South and North than theoretical arguments about inequality (Stewart 2006, 15).

In the 1980s, the basic needs approach lost support because development donors shifted their attention to the goals of stability and adjustment, but when they again started to pay attention to the poor, adopting the capability approach, and especially the more policy oriented human development paradigm, seemed more attractive. However, according to Frances Stewart (2006, 18), when applied to the concern of reducing poverty in the Global South, the capability approach and the basic needs approach are very similar in terms of the actions they recommend.

Why, then, would anyone consider the capability approach over the basic needs approach? The first reason is that the capability approach seems to have a more elegant philosophical foundation (Stewart 2006, 18). However, while its seeming elegance might have been perceived by the basic needs practitioners as a reason for its adoption, the question is whether this is true, given that there have always been the philosophical theories of needs, to which we turn below. Perhaps the answer is pragmatic and points to an advantage of the interdisciplinary nature of the capability approach: Sen did not only lay out its theoretical foundations, but also, via his empirical work and his contributions to the Human Development Reports, translated those philosophical ideas into practice. Perhaps it is the case that a philosophical theory needs some charismatic thinker who translates it into practice, since otherwise it is not picked up by policy makers. In the case of the capability approach, Sen did both the philosophical work and the policy translation.

Another reason mentioned by Stewart is that the capability approach focuses more on the situation of individuals than the basic needs approach (Stewart 2006, 18). The capability approach doesn’t recommend the delivery of the same basic goods to everyone, but rather that we take human diversity as much as possible into account. The basic needs approach was more broad-brush than the capability approach, which stresses the additional resources needed by some people, such as the disabled. A third reason is that the capability approach applies to all human beings, hence also to the rich, whereas the basic needs approach has generally been perceived as focused on poor people in poor countries (Streeten 1995, ix). The more inclusive scope of the capability approach, which applies to all human beings, resonates with an increasing acknowledgement that countries in the Global North also include people with low levels of wellbeing, and that ideas of development, social progress and prosperity apply to all countries. This is very well captured in the case of the Sustainable Development Goals, which are goals applicable to all countries.

Many of the earlier key advocates of the basic need approach are pursuing their goals now under the umbrella of the human development paradigm. Hence the pragmatic and policy oriented basic needs approach has joined the human development paradigm, which has become much stronger politically. For policy making, the influence of frameworks at a particular point in time is one of the relevant considerations whether one should adopt one framework rather than another, and hence there is a good reason why, given their pragmatic goals, the basic needs advocates have contributed to a joint endeavour with capability scholars to set up the human development paradigm.

But what about the philosophical theories of basic needs? Are there reasons why we should favour them rather than the capability approach? The arguments that were given for the pragmatic basic needs approach apply also to some extent to the questions of the complementarities and differences between the theories. There are, theoretically, close similarities between theories of needs and capabilities, and Soran Reader (2006) has argued that many of the objections that capability scholars have to theories of needs are unwarranted and based on implausibly reductionist readings of theories of needs. According to Reader, theories of needs and capability theories have much more in common than capability scholars have been willing to see.

Still, Sen has been notorious in arguing that the capability approach is superior to the basic needs approach, a critique he has reaffirmed in his latest book (Sen 2017, 25). In his paper ‘Goods and people’, Sen (1984a, 513–15) criticised the basic needs approach for being too focussed on commodities, and seeing human beings as passive and needy. Those criticisms were rebutted by Alkire (2002, 166–74), who believed they were based on misinterpretations. However, Alkire did argue that the other two claims by Sen were correct. First, that the basic needs approach confines our attention to the most desperate situations, and is therefore only useful to developing countries. Alkire, however, sees this as potentially a strength of the basic needs approach; one could argue that it helps us to focus our attention on the worst off. Sen’s final criticism was, according to Alkire, the one with most theoretical bite: that the basic needs approach does not have solid philosophical foundations.

However, the question is whether that is true. A set of recent papers by basic needs scholars (Brock and Reader 2002; Reader and Brock 2004; Reader 2006) make clear that the philosophical theory of basic needs is sophisticated; moreover, several philosophically highly sophisticated theories of needs have been proposed in the past, both in the Aristotelian tradition but also more recently by contemporary philosophers (e.g. Doyal and Gough 1991; Wiggins 1998). Instead, a more plausible explanation for the basic needs approach losing ground in comparison to the capability approach seems to me that in the case of the basic needs approach, there was less interaction between empirical scholars and policy makers on the one hand, and philosophers on the other. It is hard to find evidence of a clear synergy between basic needs philosophers and basic needs development scholars and policy advisors — an interaction that is very present in the capability literature. This may explain why the basic needs approach has been seen as lacking solid conceptual foundations.

Yet despite these hypotheses, which may help us understand why the capability approach to a large extent replaced the focus on needs in the practical field and in empirical research, some genuine differences remain. The first difference requires the capability approach to adopt some basic distinctions that are fundamental to philosophical needs theory, and for which the capability approach in itself does not have the resources: the distinction between non-contingent needs on the one hand, and contingent needs, desires, wants, etc. on the other hand. Non-contingent needs are cases in which “the needing being simply cannot go on unless its need is met” (Reader and Brock 2004, 252). This relates to a more common-sense distinction between ‘needs’ and ‘wants’, that has an important relevance to our everyday ethical life and to policy making, but that has no equivalent in the capability approach. For some applications of the capability approach, such as those related to prioritising in conditions of extreme scarcity of resources (whether these resources are money, food, water, the right to emit greenhouse gasses, etc.) theories of needs can provide tools to guide our moral priorities that are lacking in the capability approach. Right now, preferences dominate in public decision making, but the concept of preferences cannot make a distinction between a preference for minimal amounts of water, food, safety, and social interaction, versus a preference for wine and a jacuzzi. The preferences-based approach, which has become very dominant in ethical theory as well as policy analysis by economists, doesn’t have the theoretical resources to make such a distinction, whereas it is central to some of our intuitions of how to prioritise our actions in cases of scarcity (e.g. J. O’Neill 2011; Robeyns 2017a).

The second difference follows from the first. The distinction in theories of needs between the morally required (meeting non-contingent or basic needs) and the morally laudable but not required (the other needs, wants, desires, etc.) implies that the needs approach may have a smaller scope than the capability approach. The modular view of the capability approach presented in chapter 2 makes clear that the capability approach can be used for a wide variety of capabilitarian theories and applications. The basic needs approach is more focussed on situations in which we need to prioritise — but the domain of ethical questions is broader than that.

In conclusion, the basic needs approach in practice is, for pragmatic and political reasons, now part of the human development paradigm. At the theoretical level, though, capability scholars neglect to take the philosophy of needs seriously or to draw on the theoretical resources of those theories to strengthen particular capabilitarian theories and applications.