Amartya Sen's Capability Approach Research Articles

Multidimensional Poverty in Germany: A Capability Approach

The German government decided to use Amartya Sen's capability approach as the conceptual framework for the national ‘Poverty and Wealth Reports’ but concluded at the same time that the purely income-based at-risk-of-poverty rate (AROPR) is a satisfactory instrument to operationalise the capability approach. This decision made the latter the official measure to analyse poverty in Germany. This paper studies the question whether this conclusion is indeed justified by introducing two different multidimensional poverty measures to operationalise the capability approach. A thorough empirical analysis compares the poverty evaluations of the three poverty measures over time. It reveals that they differ considerably with regard to poverty trends, the identification of the most deprived and the impact of location, especially regarding West and East Germany, which may have considerable implications for targeting and demonstrates that there is indeed an urgent need for multidimensional poverty measures that complement the traditional AROPR.

Special Issue “Capability Approach and Multidimensional Well-being in High-income Countries”

This article is the Introduction to the Special Issue on “Capability Approach and Multidimensional Well-being in High-income Countries”. The volume offers an in-depth investigation of the major methodological challenges faced in the attempt to measuring and analyzing well-being in high-income countries and portrays people's well-being conditions in different European countries. It contains seven papers, which are an interesting combination of theoretical, methodological, and empirical works. The common denominator is the endorsement of Amartya Sen's capability approach as conceptual framework guiding the analysis.

POST-PRIMARY EDUCATION AND CAPABILITIES: INSIGHTS FROM YOUNG WOMEN IN RURAL UGANDA

ABSTRACTThis paper presents findings from the third stage of a longitudinal, qualitative study involving nine female participants from a class cohort in a secondary school in rural Uganda. Since 2004–05, this study has tracked the progress of these young women's lives, and the present aspect of the study explores the ways in which they have found that post-primary education has impacted their adult lives, particularly with respect to employment-related factors. I draw upon the conceptual construct of Amartya Sen's capabilities approach (1999) to interpret and present data. Findings considered in this paper indicate that post-primary education has been crucial to the capabilities development and socioeconomic well-being of the participants’ lives.

Quality teaching in rural Sub-Saharan Africa: Different perspectives, values and capabilities

Over the last decade vast sums have been invested in Sub-Saharan Africa to enhance teacher quality. Yet improvements in quality – when interpreted as enhanced pupil attainment – are disappointing. This paper shows how Amartya Sen's capability approach can help answer the call for a renewed focus on, and reconceptualisation of, quality teaching by considering the pursuit of valued goals in teachers’ work.It is increasingly understood that what teachers do, matters. Drawing on a recently completed PhD, this paper examines the professional capabilities of two women teachers from a rural Nigerian school. These teachers provide a focus for exploring the relationship between official representations of teachers’ work and the professional lives teachers create and experience. Official perspectives were extrapolated from policy documents around teachers’ work, teachers’ perspectives were drawn from an ethnography of rural teachers’ lives carried out between 2007 and 2011. A list of professional capabilities was developed from each perspective to represent what was valued in teachers’ work, and the study developed an analytical framework for evaluating teachers’ professional capability from each perspective.This paper draws out some highlights of this analysis and proposes a new cyclical model of professional capability for quality teaching.

Resource allocation in health care and the role of personal autonomy.

Resource allocation decisions in health care require the consideration of ethical values. Major ethical theories include Amartya Sen's capability approach, Norman Daniels's theory of justice for health, and preference utilitarian theory. This paper argues that while only preference utilitarian theory explicitly considers the impact of an individual's actions on others, all 3 theories agree in terms of providing individual autonomy. Furthermore, it shows that all 3 theories emphasise the role of informed preferences in securing individual autonomy. Still, stressing personal autonomy has limited direct implications for priority setting. 2 priority rules for resource allocation could be identified: 1) to give priority to patients with mental disability (over those with pure physical disability); and 2) to give priority to patients with a large expected loss of autonomy without treatment.

Amartya Sen's Capability Approach: A Framework for Well-Being Evaluation and Policy Analysis?

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we discuss the main conceptual and methodological issues related to the operationalization of Amartya Sen's capability approach. Second, we review quantitative applications of the capability approach in different domains to examine how methodological and empirical challenges are addressed. The use of the capability approach implies a broadening of the “informational basis of judgments” and thereby leads to conclusions that differ from those drawn using standard economic approaches.

Which Dimensions Should Matter for Capabilities? A Constitutional Approach

Multidimensional theories of well-being are locked into a debate about value judgment. They seek to settle which dimensions should matter for measurement and policy, and, more importantly, on what grounds to decide what should matter. Moreover, there is a gulf between theory and practice, given that measurement and policy are rarely rooted in a coherent ethical framework. Our paper engages in the debate concerning the legitimate grounds for selecting dimensions. Combining Amartya Sen's capability approach and John Rawls’ method of political constructivism, we explore whether the constitution and its public culture can be used as an ethically sound informational base for selecting dimensions, and if so, why. We apply this ‘constitutional approach’ to the Italian case with the aim of deriving a set of publicly justifiable dimensions of well-being. It is a long-standing Constitution with broad public consultation at its base, which still enjoys a wide consensus. We seek to show why there is a need for more ethically sound methodological approaches to measuring well-being, pointing out the advantages of the constitutional approach, and how it may enrich the work of practitioners engaged in the policies of well-being.

Exploring and Conceptualizing Empowerment: Introduction to the Special Issue on Media and Empowerment

Even though the issue of empowerment has been widely discussed in debates across various research fields, public policy forums, and media, it is an ambiguous concept. This special issue focuses on empowerment and new media. The articles in this special issue, which advance innovative theoretical and methodological frameworks, focus on the theoretical grounding of the notion of empowerment; empirical research on structures and processes that shape the emergence of individual and collective empowerment within online communities; the value of Amartya Sen's capability approach for community informatics research; and development of a methodological framework for measuring and monitoring the dynamics of digital inequalities correctly.

A Capability Approach to Intergenerational Justice? Examining the Potential of Amartya Sen's Ethics with Regard to Intergenerational Issues

The idea of intergenerational justice has practical consequences, not least because it is linked to the politically influential, wide-ranging concept of sustainable development. It also bears on several philosophical puzzles arising in the context of intergenerational justice. They need to be solved in order to establish a case for intergenerational obligations of justice. In this paper we shall examine Amartya Sen's capability approach in the light of these questions. In developing an account of human development, Sen's capability approach suggests a conception of some aspects of intragenerational justice, but not of intergenerational justice itself. This paper aims to close this gap in two steps: first, it identifies necessary elements of a theory of justice; second, and subsequently, it examines how successful the capability approach is in providing these elements.

E‐trade Facilitation in Ghana: A Capability Approach Perspective

AbstractA growing number of countries are adopting e‐government to deliver greater operational efficiency, cost savings and transparency. The current wave of globalization and the integration of the world economy have intensified international trade volumes. Thus, the prospect of development through trade has driven some countries sub‐Saharan Africa to adopt information and communication technologies (ICTs), particularly electronic data interchange (EDI) to facilitate international trade. This paper applies Amartya Sen's Capability Approach (CA) as a framework to examine the effect of an e‐government initiative intended to modernise customs operational procedures and facilitate trade. E‐trade facilitation has given individuals and businesses the opportunity to lodge import and exports declarations electronically with a single document, resulting in time and cost savings as declarations can be made electronically from any location and at any time. The paper makes a contribution by offering a useful example of the affordances of the CA for examining e‐government initiatives particularly in developing countries focusing on what people can actually do with the opportunities provided by e‐government, rather than using income‐based measures.

The outlines of innovation policy in the capability approach

Innovation policies are usually expected to contribute to growth in economic performance, in productivity, or in employment. These ultimate objectives are formulated in the political arena; therefore, the examination of their adequacy is beyond the scope of innovation studies. However, these aims are increasingly questioned in other fields of economics. The present paper builds on one of the most influential criticisms of the dominating growth-centred traditions of economics: Amartya Sen's capability approach. We analyze the set of information that would be required for the design, implementation and evaluation of innovation policy if it relied on the capability approach, and how this informational basis would differ from that of the growth centred view. We conclude that switching to the capability approach would result in a sea-change, but the systems of innovation approach, as a framework for analysis, would still be of good use.

Beyond Stakeholder Utility Function: Stakeholder Capability in the Value Creation Process

In spite of the thousands of articles on stakeholder theory, research on value creation has had a shorter history and narrower breadth. Only a few studies have researched value creation from stakeholder perspective looking at how stakeholders appropiate value or the processes or activities by which stakeholders create value. Consequently to date, certain questions still remain unanswered regarding how a firm should treat stakeholders in order to create value. Several questions arise specifically from the stakeholder's side: What does "value" mean for a particular group of stakeholders and how do firms create these different types of value? How do we measure the value created by stakeholders? The purpose of this paper is to answer these questions from Amartya Sen's Capability Approach, identifying and measuring stakeholders' capabilities in the value creation process. Stakeholder Capability is the adequate concept for understanding stakeholder welfare rather than the utility function concept. The empirical evidence comes from an in-depth case study of the company The Grobo Group and its stakeholders. According to the results, the following stakeholder capabilities are relevant to value creation: being employable, being autonomus, being innovative, being entreprenurial, being responsive, being socially integrated, being emphatic, being "green" and being healthy.

Environmental justice and health practices: understanding how health inequities arise at the local level

While empirical evidence continues to show that people living in low socio-economic status neighbourhoods are less likely to engage in health-enhancing behaviour, our understanding of why this is so remains less than clear. We suggest that two changes could take place to move from description to understanding in this field; (i) a move away from the established concept of individual health behaviour to a contextualised understanding of health practices; and (ii) a switch from focusing on health inequalities in outcomes to health inequities in conditions. We apply Pierre Bourdieu's theory on capital interaction but find it insufficient with regard to the role of agency for structural change. We therefore introduce Amartya Sen's capability approach as a useful link between capital interaction theory and action to reduce social inequities in health-related practices. Sen's capability theory also elucidates the importance of discussing unequal chances in terms of inequity, rather than inequality, in order to underscore the moral nature of inequalities. We draw on the discussion in social geography on environmental injustice, which also underscores the moral nature of the spatial distribution of opportunities. The article ends by applying this approach to the 'Interdisciplinary study of inequalities in smoking' framework.

Operationalising the capability approach for outcome measurement in mental health research

Amartya Sen's multidimensional capability approach focuses on the importance of freedoms to be or do things people have reason to value. It is an alternative to standard utilitarian welfarism, the theoretical approach to quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and cost-utility analyses. Despite the limitations of the utility approach in capturing non-health benefits and broader welfare inequalities, there have been very limited applications of the capability approach in the mental health context where these issues are imperative.We report the development and application of a multidimensional instrument, the OxCAP-MH, which aims to operationalise the capability approach for outcome measurement in mental health research. The study was carried out as part of an ongoing programme on community coercion experienced by service users with severe and enduring mental illness being treated using Community Treatment Orders. Capabilities data were collected at baseline in the OCTET RCT for 333 ‘revolving door’ mental health service users who were in involuntary hospital treatment at the time of recruitment in England (2008–2011). The research focused on the identification of capabilities domains most affected by mental illness and their association with socio-demographic and clinical factors and other measures of well-being such as the EQ-5D and Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) scales.The OxCAP-MH item response rate was 90%–68%. There were significant correlations between service users' overall capability scores and the GAF, EQ-5D VAS and EQ-5D-3L utilities (corr = 0.249, 0.514, 0.415, respectively). The most affected capability domains were: ‘Daily activities’, ‘Influencing local decisions’, ‘Enjoying recreation’, ‘Planning one's life’ and ‘Discrimination’. Age had a mixed effect, while female service users and those with a primary diagnosis of schizophrenia or longer illness duration reported significantly lower capability scores. The results support the feasibility and validity of directly measuring human capabilities for the mentally ill and the potential for applying the approach to outcome measurement.

Biomedical Enhancements as Justice

Biomedical enhancements, the applications of medical technology to make better those who are neither ill nor deficient, have made great strides in the past few decades. Using Amartya Sen's capability approach as my framework, I argue in this article that far from being simply permissible, we have a prima facie moral obligation to use these new developments for the end goal of promoting social justice. In terms of both range and magnitude, the use of biomedical enhancements will mark a radical advance in how we compensate the most disadvantaged members of society.

SOBRE OS CONCEITOS DE JUSTIÇA E LIBERDADE NAS OBRAS DE SEN E FRASER

O presente artigo discute as semelhanças e as diferenças entre a abordagem das capabilities, de Amartya Sen, e a teoria da justiça como paridade participativa, de Nancy Fraser. Para tanto, reconstrói, em suas linhas gerais, as teorias dos dois autores e examina as críticas de Fraser a Sen, mostrando que estas são equívocas, assim como são equívocas as supostas vantagens que Robeyns aponta na teoria de Sen. Este artigo conclui ressaltando que as duas teorias têm consequências práticas bastante similares, não obstante o fato de uma ser, principalmente, uma teoria do desenvolvimento e a outra ser uma teoria da justiça.

Public services in Erfurt and Frankfurt am Main compared (c. 1890–1914): capabilities in Prussia?

ABSTRACTHow can a modern concept like Amartya Sen's capability approach be introduced in historical studies? One possibility is to ask how public services were implemented in municipal policy and how these services open up capabilities for the individuals of a city. This article uses Sen's theoretical framework as an analytical tool to explore two Prussian towns, Erfurt and Frankfurt am Main, and their public services (job centres and tramway systems) as examples of social policy at the local level.

Choosing to compromise: women studying childcare

Reporting on a study of mature women training to work in childcare, this article demonstrates how some women choose to be part-time mothers, workers and students, wanting ‘the best of both worlds’. It presents a theory of integrated lives that contrasts with customary deficit models and shows how a series of reciprocal links bind the women's different roles together, introducing an adaptation of Coser's theory of greedy institutions to demonstrate how this is an inherently stable position. Whilst the theory can stand alone, it is usefully recast as a localised example of a capability set as it frames the co-realisable choices open to the women. Making further links with Amartya Sen's capability approach, it is suggested that we should encourage governmental interventions that enable individual choice and support those women who want to integrate their lives alongside those who seek parity in the public sphere.

Educating Capabilities

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes In 2003 Madoko Saito first set out to consider what she termed ‘the underexplored’ relationship between the capability approach and education (Saito, 2003 Saito, M. 2003. Amartya Sen's capability approach to education: A critical exploration. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37(1): 17–33. (doi:10.1111/1467-9752.3701002)[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Although, Sen, Nussbaum and Gasper had all written about capabilities and education in the 1990s, Saito began a trend for commentators from within education, to consider the scope of the capability approach for questions about education as theory, practice, and a field of empirical research. Some significant milestones in the development of this literature have been a number of edited volumes (Walker and Unterhalter, 2007 Walker, M. and Unterhalter, E. 2007. Sen's Capability Approach and Social Justice in Education, Edited by: Walker, M. and Unterhalter, E. London: Palgrave. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Otto and Ziegler, 2010 Otto, H. and Ziegler, H. 2010. Education, Welfare and the Capabilities Approach. A Euroepan Perspective, Edited by: Otto, H. and Ziegler, H. Opladen: Barbara Budruch Publishers. [Google Scholar]; Biggeri et al., 2011 Biggeri, M., Ballet, J. and Comim, F. 2011. Children and the Capability Approach, Edited by: Biggeri, M., Ballet, J. and Comim, F. London: Palgrave. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Boni and Walker, 2013 Boni, A. and Walker, M. 2013. Human Development and Capabilities: Re-imagining the University of the Twenty First Century, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and some special journal issues, notably Studies in the Philosophy of Education (vol. 28, no. 5, 2009), the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities (vol. 13, no. 3, 2012), and the Cambridge Journal of Education (vol. 42, no. 3, 2012). A number of monographs have also been produced. Additional informationNotes on contributorsElaine UnterhalterElaine Unterhalter is Professor of Education and International Development at the Institute of Education, London, UK

REALISING SOCIAL JUSTICE IN PUBLIC HEALTH LAW

Law has played an important, but largely constitutive, role in the development of the public health enterprise. Thus, law has been central to setting up the institutions and offices of public health. The moral agenda has, however, been shaped to a much greater extent by bioethics. While social justice has been placed at the heart of this agenda, we argue that there has been little place within dominant conceptions of social justice for gender equity and women's interests which we see as crucial to a fully realised vision of social justice. We argue that, aside from particular interventions in the field of reproduction, public health practice tends to marginalise women-a claim we support by critically examining strategies to combat the HIV pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. To counter the marginalisation of women's interests, this article argues that Amartya Sen's capabilities approach has much to contribute to the framing of public health law and policy. Sen's approach provides an evaluative and normative framework which recognises the importance of both gender and health equity to achieving social justice. We suggest that domestic law and international human rights provisions, in particular the emerging human right to health, offer mechanisms to promote capabilities, and foster a robust and inclusive conception of social justice.