Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a

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4. Critiques and Debates 199 there are at least four valid reasons why we should make a distinction between the two ideas. The first reason is historical: while the capability approach has been very important in the development of the human development paradigm, the human development paradigm has derived insights and concepts from several other theories and frameworks. Human development has been defined as “an expansion of human capabilities, a widening of choices, an enhancement of freedoms and a fulfilment of human rights” (Fukuda-Parr and Kumar 2003, xxi). There are important historical ideas in the human development paradigm that are to a significant extent based on Sen’s capability approach. And Sen was closely involved in the development of the Human Development Reports that have been key in the maturing of the human development paradigm. Yet as some key contributors to this paradigm have rightly pointed out, it had other intellectual roots too, such as the basic needs approach (Streeten 1995; Fukuda-Parr 2003; Sen 2003a). The second reason is intellectual. The capability approach is used for a very wide range of purposes, as the account I presented in chapter 2 makes amply clear. These include purposes that are only tangentially, or very indirectly, related to human development concerns. For example, the philosopher Martin van Hees (2013) is interested in the structural properties of capabilities, especially how the formal analysis of rights fits into the capability concept. This research allows us to see how capabilities, as a concept, would fit in, and relate to, the existing literature on the structure of rights. But it would be a big stretch to say that this is also a contribution to the human development literature; in fact, I would find such a statement an implausible inflation of what we understand by ‘human development’. Rather, it is much more plausible to say that the study by Van Hees is a contribution to the capability literature, but not to the human development literature. If we were wrongly to equate the capability approach with the human development paradigm, this would create problems for understanding such a study as part of the capability approach. The third reason is practical. Those who have written about the human development paradigm stress that ‘development’ is about all people and all countries, and not only about countries which are often
200 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice called ‘developing countries’, that is, countries with a much higher incidence of absolute poverty, and often with a less developed economic infrastructure. For example, Paul Streeten (1995, viii) writes: We defined human development as widening the range of people’s choices. Human development is a concern not only for poor countries and poor people, but everywhere. In the high-income countries, indicators of shortfalls in human development should be looked for in homelessness, drug addiction, crime, unemployment, urban squalor; environmental degradation, personal insecurity and social disintegration. The inclusion of all human beings within the scope of ‘human development thinking’ is widely endorsed within human development scholarship and policy reports. However, it is also a matter of fact that most people, including policy makers, associate the term ‘development’ not with improvements to the lives of people living in high-income countries. This is unfortunate, but it is a fact one needs to reckon with. In high-income countries, some of the terms often used for what could also be called ‘human development interventions’ are ‘policies’, ‘institutional design’, or ‘social transformations’. While it is laudable to deconstruct the term ‘development’, at the same time we should be careful about using words that would lead to scholars and policy makers in highincome countries to neglect the capability approach if they (mistakenly) believe that it is a framework only suitable for ‘developing countries’ (as they would use the term). The final reason is political. There are many capability scholars who would like to develop an alternative to neoliberalism, or, more specifically when it concerns development policies, to the ‘Washington consensus’. While more sophisticated analyses of both doctrines have been put forward, both doctrines focus on private property rights; the primacy of markets as an allocation mechanism; the focus in macroeconomic policies on controlling inflation and reducing fiscal deficits; economic liberalisation with regard to free trade and capital flows; and, overall, restricted and reduced involvement of governments in the domestic economy, such as markets in labour, land and capital (the so-called ‘factor markets’) (Gore 2000; Fukuda-Parr 2003; McCleery and De Paolis 2008). The ‘Washington consensus’ refers to the development
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Contents Acknowledgements 3 1. Intr
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3. Clarifications 89 3.1 Introducti
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4.7 What about power and political
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Acknowledgements In 1998, when I st
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Acknowledgements 5 the capability a
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1. Introduction Many people who en
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1. Introduction 9 capability approa
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1. Introduction 11 Moreover, it bri
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1. Introduction 13 Countries Outsi
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1. Introduction 15 capabilities of
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1. Introduction 17 their collaborat
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1. Introduction 19 This book has a
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