Beginning with the 1979 Tanner Lecture on ‘Equality of What?’ delivered at Stanford University and, subsequently, in many articles and several books that tackle a range of economic, social and ethical questions, Professor Sen (1980; 1984; 1985; 1987; 1992; 1999)
45 has developed, refined and defended a framework that is directly concerned with human capability and freedom (Clark, 2005). Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach (CA) has emerged as the leading alternative to standard economic frameworks for thinking about poverty, inequality and human development generally (Ibid.) and a critique of the largely utilitarian strand of thinking in welfare economics and welfarist approaches more generally (Ibid.;
Mehta, 2006).
According to (Clark, 2005), the theoretical roots of the CA can be traced back to Aristotle, Classical Political Economy and Karl Marx, as well as more recent theoretical works, such as Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971) and his emphasis on ‘self-respect’ and access to primary goods (Sen 1992:8). From the start Sen acknowledged strong connections with Adam Smith’s (1776) analysis of ‘necessities’ and living conditions and Karl Marx’s (1844) concern with human freedom and emancipation. Later on Sen (1993:46) recognised that ‘the most powerful conceptual connections’ relate to Aristotle’s theory of ‘political distribution’ and his analysis of eudaimonia, which is ‘human flourishing’ (Nussbaum, 1988; 1990).
Conceptual foundations of the CA can be found in Sen’s critiques of traditional welfare economics, which typically conflate well-being with either opulence (income, commodity command) or utility (happiness, desire fulfilment) (Mehta, 2006; Clark, 2005; Grasso, 2002).
Sen’s approach clearly requires “a broader informational base, which focuses particularly on people’s capability to choose the life they have reason to value” (Sen 1999:63 in Grasso, 2002), to highlight the social and economic factors which give them the opportunity to do, and to be what they consider valuable for their fulfilment (Grasso, 2002). As such, the CA focuses directly on the substantive ‘freedoms’ of the individuals involved. In this sense, therefore, Sen suggests that well-being (or the standard of living) should be considered in terms of human ‘functionings’ and ‘capabilities’ (Ibid.; Clark, 2005).
Clark explains that Sen begins by considering income or commodity command. Like Adam Smith, Sen (1983) emphasises that economic growth and the expansion of goods and services are necessary for human development. However, like Aristotle, he reiterates the familiar argument that ‘wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking, for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else’ (Sen, 1990, p.44). Sen therefore argues that in judging the quality of life we should consider what people are able to achieve. He then
46 observes that different people and societies typically differ in their capacity to convert income and commodities into valuable achievements. In comparing the well-being of different people, therefore, not enough information is provided by looking only at the commodities each can successfully command. Hence it is necessary to consider how well people are able to function with the goods and services at their disposal (Clark, 2005).
Functioning is an achievement of a person, in other words, what she or he manages to do or be (Clark, 2005). It reflects, as it were, a part of the ‘state’ of that person (Sen, 1985:10 in Ibid.). Functionings relate to what a person may value doing or being, they are the living conditions achieved by an individual and represent a set of interrelated activities and states (“doings” and “beings”) that form her life (Grasso, 2002). Achieving a functioning with a given bundle of commodities depends on a range of personal and social factors (Clark, 2005). A functioning therefore refers to the use a person makes of the commodities at his or her command. Capability reflects a person’s ability to achieve a given functioning (Saith, 2001:8 in Ibid.). In Marco Grasso’s analysis, capabilities concern the ability of an individual to achieve different combinations of functionings, and define the freedom to choose the life that she prefers. Although these two concepts are complementary they are distinctly different in that a functioning is an achievement, whereas a capability is the ability to achieve. While functionings are more directly related to living conditions, capabilities are notions of freedom, in the positive sense, about “what real opportunities you have regarding the life you may lead” (Sen, 1987:36 in Grasso, 2002).
Given that capabilities refer to substantive ‘freedoms’ or the ability to choose the life one has reasons to value, the CA allows focus to go beyond the primary goods that an individual holds (after Rawls) and thereby embrace the characteristics that govern the conversion of commodities “into the person’s ability to promote her ends” (Sen 1999:75 in Mehta, 2006).
From such perspective, therefore, Sen’s CA suggests that in order to overcome poverty and inequality, it is not sufficient for people to possess livelihood assets, endowments and capacities. What is critical is their ability to exercise substantive freedoms to turn such resources or commodities into functionings and capabilities (Grasso, 2002; Clark, 2005).
Capabilities also accommodate the diversity of human experiences and situations, as well as multidimensional understandings of poverty, inequality, wellbeing, development and
47 freedom (Mehta, 2006). For this thesis, the value of Sen’s CA lies in its amenability to the development of a rigorous methodological approach to operationalize the study aim and objectives within the context of complexity in interactions between institutions and livelihoods. Indeed, a distinctive characteristic of Sen’s CA is that it does not provide a formula or “path” to carry out welfare measurements and comparisons, and such
‘incompleteness’ approximates the ambiguity and complexity of human life and values (Grasso, 2002) and thereby allows for flexibility in the handling of diverse contexts. This is consistent with the widespread acceptance by economists nowadays that the traditional utilitarian notion of welfare can render only a partial picture of human well-being (Grasso, 2002) and that human development is interested not only in economic growth, but also in expanding human capabilities and in human choice (Anand & Sen 2000 in Mehta, 2006).
Despite this, there persists a dominance of economic growth based approaches and rent-seeking behaviour in agricultural sector interventions within impoverished contexts (Bene et al, 2010). Meanwhile, welfarist approaches seem to continue to grapple with identifying effective ways of achieving alignment between institutional interventions and with local people’s livelihood needs.
Clark’s view (2005) is that the CA probably has the most in common with the Basic Needs Approach to development, which was pioneered by Paul Streeten et al (1981) and Frances Stewart (1985) among others. However, Sen argues that basic needs approaches tend to lapse into ‘commodity fetishism’. While such argument is considered a valid criticism of the original formulation of basic needs, proponents of the latter generation of basic needs approaches have refuted the contention on the basis that the concept of basic needs was not centred on the possession of commodities. Despite this criticism, it is now widely recognised that the CA manages to bring together many of the concerns of basic needs theorists (originally expressed in a rather ad-hoc manner) into a single coherent philosophical framework (Clark, 2005). Furthermore, unlike the basic needs approaches, the CA extends beyond the analysis of poverty and deprivation and largely concerns itself with well-being generally. Alkire (2002:170 in Ibid.) observes that ‘the single most important function of the CA is to make explicit some implicit assumptions in the basic needs approaches about the value of choice and participation (and the disvalue of coercion)’. In this regards, Sen’s conceptualization of freedom is particularly useful.
48 Sen’s concept of freedom involves “both the processes that allow freedom of action and decisions, and the actual opportunities that people have, given their personal and social circumstances” (Sen, 1999:17 in Boykoff, 2003). Sen devotes much attention to various interconnected elements of instrumental freedoms, concerned with “the way different kinds of rights, opportunities, and ‘entitlements’ contribute to the expansion of human freedom in general, and thus to promoting development” (Sen, 1999:37 in Ibid.).