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

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