Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a
Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a
Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
2. Core Ideas <strong>and</strong> the Framework<br />
81<br />
that the arrows do not indicate normative importance but rather indicate<br />
which parts of this conceptual system are determinants of, or have an<br />
influence on, other parts.<br />
Let us start our description where economists generally start (<strong>and</strong><br />
often also end): with resources. In the capability approach, the term<br />
‘resources’ is interpreted in a broader sense than the underst<strong>and</strong>ing<br />
of that term elsewhere in the social sciences. Economics <strong>and</strong> the<br />
quantitative empirical social sciences have traditionally focussed<br />
on material resources only: either income <strong>and</strong> wealth, or else on<br />
the consumption that these financial means (or unpaid production)<br />
generated. One important lesson learnt from feminist economics is that<br />
about half of economic production happens outside the market <strong>and</strong> the<br />
formal economy, which is the reason why the box at the far left in Figure<br />
2.1 also includes resources created by non-market production (Folbre<br />
2008; Folbre <strong>and</strong> Bittman 2004).<br />
Both the resources <strong>and</strong> the consumption could be conceptualised as<br />
capability inputs: they are the means to the opportunities to be the person<br />
one wants to be, <strong>and</strong> do what one has reason to value doing. <strong>The</strong> means<br />
do not all have the same power to generate capabilities; this depends on<br />
a person’s conversion factors, as well as the structural constraints that<br />
she faces. Those structural constraints can have a great influence on the<br />
conversion factors as well as on the capability sets directly.<br />
From this visualisation, we can also see the difference between the<br />
social conversion factors <strong>and</strong> the structural constraints. <strong>The</strong> structural<br />
constraints affect a person’s set of conversion factors, including the social<br />
conversion factors she faces. But recall that those conversion factors tell<br />
us something about the degree to which people can turn resources into<br />
capabilities. Conversion factors are thus, conceptually <strong>and</strong> empirically,<br />
closely related to the capability inputs — that is, the resources that are<br />
needed to generate capabilities. Structural constraints affect conversion<br />
factors, but can also affect a person’s capability set without impacting on<br />
the conversion of resources in capabilities. For example, if a certain set<br />
of social norms characterizes a group in society as not having the same<br />
moral status as others, then this affects the capabilities of the members<br />
of that group directly, not merely in terms of what they can get out of