A Plurality of Ways to Specify the Capability Framework
One of the claims that characterises the capability approach (see, e.g., Nussbaum 2011; Robeyns 2017; Sen 1985) is that the information that matters to a person’s well-being is her real freedom (reflected by a person’s capability set) to achieve ‘doings and beings’ (the so-called functionings) (s)he has reason to value.[143] Two crucial shifts are involved.
One is a shift from the resources or means that are available for people to achieve wellbeing to well-being itself, where well-being is understood as the ‘doings and beings’ or functionings that a person has reason to value. The second shift is from achievements to the effective freedom to achieve, reflected by her capability set.Even though this gives already some indication about the information relevant for the evaluation of human well-being and related concepts along the capability approach, it does not yet specify sufficiently well which information is relevant. Which information matters and how the capability approach is specified will depend to a crucial extent on the purpose for which it is used. If the capability approach is employed for practical project or policy assessment in a specific area, say health, then it might be that some specific health-related individual functionings, such as being well- nourished or being well-sheltered, matter while others do not. If on the other hand one is interested in developing the capability approach into a theory of justice in political philosophy, in addition to specifying the relevant valuable functionings, for questions about justice it will also matter how they are distributed between different (groups of) people.
In recent decades, the capability approach has been specified in many different ways across a large number of disciplines. It became a prominent framework to conceptualise and assess well-being and related concepts in theory and practice, ranging from development and educational studies to law and political science.
To give some impression of this plurality of ways in which the capability approach has been specified in recent decades, we shall discuss some of these areas in greater detail before taking up the question about the characterising features all of these theoretical and practical applications of the framework have in common.[144]As detailed in Gilardone’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 13), one particularly well-known application of the capability framework resulted in a new approach to human development, becoming the basis to measure human development by the United Nations Development Programme, replacing the GDP-focused measurement (Sen 1983). Sen and ul Haq developed the first comprehensive alternative to GDP measures of human development that gained increasing importance in assessments of human development by the UN, the World Bank and other international organisations (Fukuda-Parr 2003).
Another area in which the capability approach gained increasing prominence has been as an alternative to cost-benefit analysis in project and policy assessment. Alkire (2002) has shown for instance that the broader informational basis capability assessments provide by accounting for nonmonetary impacts on valuable ‘doings and beings’ can lead to very different assessments of projects. For example, an Oxfam-funded project in Pakistan that supported women to start their own rose growing and selling business would not have been refunded if purely assessed in terms of its monetary cost-benefit balance. However, once one also accounted for the project’s non-monetary influence on the women’s valuable doings and beings, such as their financial independence, strengthened self-worth and joy about the beauty of the roses, the assessment pointed clearly towards a refunding of the project (Alkire 2002). Especially in such cross-cultural applications it seems of crucial importance to uphold pluralism and to make sure one does not neglect diversity. Alkire succeeds in doing so in her assessment by choosing to involve the women themselves by means of a participatory measure.
However, it has been argued that by giving too much room for possible differences, one risks running into the second problem the capability approach was meant to avoid. That is, possibly problematic values that might be due to phenomena of adaptation, a lack of reflection or oppression can come on board and distort one’s assessment of people’s well-being.More generally, the capability approach became very influential in development studies (Gasper 2002) and development ethics in theory and practice (Fiebiger Byskov 2018; Drydyk and Keleher 2019). A special feature of the capability framework is that it allows for theoretical discussion about existing concepts, such as well-being, development or poverty for instance, as well as their practical operationalisation and measurement. Such a bridge between conceptual discussion and practical application is a particularly strong feature of poverty measures based on the capability approach that were pioneered in recent years on a theoretical and operational level (Alkire and Foster 2011). One of the main differences to conventional poverty measures is their multidimensionality. Poverty is understood as deprivation in a plurality of dimensions, such as health, education or work for instance, allowing one to account for an interdependence between such multidimensional deprivation as well.
These are but some of the areas where the capability approach has gained prominence in recent years. Other areas where the capability framework became widely used range from educational studies (Saito 2003) and debates about the conceptualisation of health and its measurement, to legal scholarship, such as debates about legal rights (Nussbaum 2006) or minority and indigenous rights (Binder and Binder 2016; Kramm 2019; Wantene et al. 2019). Another important area is debates about justice in political philosophy, where Nussbaum (2006) developed her own capability theory of justice to address what she sees as blind spots in the Rawlsian theory.
However, whilst Sen is associated with capability theory, it is not clear how far his account of justice (Sen 2009) is a variant of the capability approach. It has been argued that it is not (Baujard and Gilardone 2017).That capability theory has been able to develop in this way is partly due to the openness and underspecification of the approach, that allows it to be completed in different ways so as to deal with specific problems. It thus lends itself to different practical and theoretical applications. Its underspecification is one of the features that gives the capability approach its appeal as a broad evaluative framework that can be used to address different problems in different areas in which the information relevant to assess a person's state might vary. The drawback of this flexibility is that it risks blurring the picture of what constitutes the approach. Nowadays, many frameworks and assessments are described as being capability approaches but it is not always clear what all of these different variants have in common or why they should be considered variants of the capability approach. So, what are the features that characterise the capability approach?
Robeyns (2017) recently developed a way to categorise and systematise these different specifications and applications. She uses the term capabil- itarianism to denote the class of all variants and specifications of the general capability framework. Her categorisation consists of a core, containing the characterising features shared by all of its variants, as well as a set of issues and questions that can be answered differently dependent on how the approach is used. Within the core of characterising features, identified by Robeyns, are the following: first, functionings (i.e. ends instead of resources) and capability (i.e. freedom instead of achievements) form the informational space for the evaluation of human well-being and related concepts. Second, different people have different capacities to convert resources into functionings, dependent on their personal, social and environmental conversion factors.
A third characterising feature is the distinction between means and ends where the ends are reflected by the capability set that contains the functionings open to a person and the actually achieved combination of functionings. A fourth fundamental building block of the capability approach is value pluralism, which involves allowing for different conceptions of the good life in the assessment of human well-being with the capability approach.This categorisation promises to provide much needed clarification in the current capability literature about the openness of the framework and its necessary commitments.[145] Worries could be raised that such a broad way to characterise the class of capability theories risks erring at the other extreme by including specifications that do not succeed in addressing the problems the capability approach was originally meant to address. In this light, it seems to be a more promising route to explore whether the two main characterising features of the capability approach - that also belong to the core of Robeyns's categorization - namely the shift from means to ends (functionings) and the shift from achievements to freedom (capability), are sufficient to overcome the problem of diversity-neglect and the adaptation problem, respectively. In the next section we shall see that a move to freedom is not sufficient to address these problems. Whether certain variants in the capability approach do indeed succeed in addressing the problems it was originally meant to address and allow one to move beyond welfarism, will depend on the way freedom is conceptualised and the reason(s) why it is valued.
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