CAPABILITY APPROACH BY AMARTYA

SEN

“Following Amartya Sen, we see development as a process of expanding

freedoms equally for all people.”
WORLD DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2012

“Sen’s explanation of human centered development are founded on

understanding what deprived communities value and aspire to as
individuals, families and collective entities”
OECT DCR 2013,ENDING POVERTY

“In adoption of an understanding of well being that derives from Sen’s

ideas, we de ne wellbeing as the freedoms and capability to make choices
and act effectively with respect to, for example, health, education,
nutrition, employment etc.”
LANCET COMMISSION, 2015

“In effect, what really matters are the capabilities of people, that is, the
extent of their opportunity set and of their freedom to choose among this
set, the life they value.”
STIGLITZ SEN FITOUSSI COMMISSION 2009

“The inability to understand how people of different ages, capabilities or

income levels have been faring under the MDGs has hampered the design
and implementation of strategies to tackle discrimination and ensure
achievement of the goals.”
SDSN REPORT ON SDGs, JULY 2014

“The capability approach sees human progress, ultimately, as the progress

ofhuman freedom and capability to lead the kind of lives that people have
reason to value.”
DIEZE and SEN, 2013
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WHO IS AMARTYA SEN?

Also Known As –
“the consciousness of the profession of economics”

Amartya Kumar Sen was born on 3 November 1933 in Bengal. He is an

Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and
worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. Sen has made
contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and
social justice, economic theories of famines, decision theory,
development economics, public health, and measures of well-being of
countries.

He is currently a Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor

of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He formerly served
as Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.

AREAS OF RESEARCH - Sen has been a noted author of many books on

welfare economics, development economics, and other subjects.
Additional areas of research include social choice theory, public health,
economic measurement, rationality and economic behavior, economic
methodology, gender studies, moral and political philosophy, and the
economics of war and peace.

Amartya Sen occupies a unique position among modern economists. He

is an outstanding economic theorist, a world authority on social choice
and welfare economics. He is carrying out path-breaking work on
appraising the effectiveness of investment in poor countries and more
recently, on the economic analysis of famines. He has greatly in uenced
the international organisation's such as the United National
Development Organisation (UNDP), International Labour Organisation
(ILO) and the World Bank. Over the years, he introduced innovative
solutions to help underdeveloped countries to cope with social
problems like poverty, famine, gender inequality, human rights and
biased liberalism. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was
awarded to him for his work in welfare economics in 1998 and also
honoured by the then President of India with the Bharat Ratna in 1999.
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 WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT FOR SEN?

The expression human development rst appeared in the World Report

on Human Development (1990), became in uential for including a
statistical appendix introducing the Human Development Index. It
shifted the focus of economic growth to a people-oriented development
model. The traditional focus on standards of living, economic
variables and goods was replaced by human welfare in terms of
life expectancy, education, and health.

The United Nations Development Programme (1990) report

de nes human development as
“the enlargement of the range of people’s
choices”
.
Human development, according to Sen, cannot be limited to the growth
of the gross national product (GNP), the rise in income, or the increased
levels of industrialization and technological advancements. He
maintains that income, utilities, resources and wealth act as means
towards an end for human development, and not as ends in
themselves.

Sen (2000) attests that-

“the usefulness of wealth lies in the things
that it allows us to do”
.
This brings us to Sen’s understanding of human development as
enhancement of the lives we lead and the freedoms we enjoy, thus,
human development is de ned as the removal of major hindrances to
our freedom. Some of these hindrances are poverty, tyranny, poor
economic opportunities and others. In this context, the expansion of
freedom is viewed both as a primary end and the principal means for
development. Human development is achieved when people have
greater freedoms (capabilities).
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 HOW THIS DEVELOPMENT IS ACHIEVED?

Thus, human development as an expansion of individual substantive

freedoms occurs with the improving of institutional frameworks such as
markets, public services, the judiciary systems, political parties, mass
media, and public discussions.

Additionally, human development would really mean making the

person more capable through investing in social sectors and public
infrastructures and in the long term these goals will improve the health,
education and social capabilities of people. This draws attention to
what makes life worthwhile: people’s ‘centeredness’. This departure
sees human development in terms of expansion of individual freedoms
in the bundle of opportunities that one has reasons to value.

WHAT IS CAPABILITY APPROACH?

The capability approach is a widely in uential approach in

contemporary political philosophy, social justice, development studies,
studies on poverty and inequality, and in public policy. The
distinguishing characteristic of the capability approach is its focus on
what people are effectively able to do and to be, that is, their
capabilities.
It was formulated by Sen and further developed by Martha
Nussbaum. Sen de nes the capability of a person as that which-

“re ects the alternative combinations of functionings the person

achieves and from which he/she can choose one collection”
.
The Capability Approach is de ned by its choice of focus upon the moral
signi cance of individuals’ capability of achieving the kind of lives they
have reason to value. This distinguishes it from more established
approaches to ethical evaluation, such as utilitarianism or resourcism,
which focuses exclusively on subjective well-being or the availability of
means to the good life, respectively. A person’s capability to live a good
life is de ned in terms of the set of valuable ‘beings and doings’ like
being in good health or having loving relationships with others to which
they have real access.
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When evaluating well-being, Sen argues, the most important thing is to
consider what people are actually able to be and do. The commodities or
wealth people have or their mental reactions (utility) are an
inappropriate focus because they provide only limited or indirect
information about how well a life is going.

So, the Capability Approach focuses directly on the quality of life that
individuals are actually able to achieve. This quality of life is analyzed in
terms of the core concepts of ‘functionings’ and ‘capability’.

FEATURES OF THE CAPABILITY APPROACH

FOCUS ON HUMAN ENDS- It sees human wellbeing, the ourishing of

human lives as something of intrinsic value, that needs no further
explanation. That we simply work for because it is good in and of itself.

RESPECTING PEOPLE’S ABILITY (AGENCY) - At the same time, it

focuses on people as active agents, so it respects people’s ability to
pursue goals, to realize, to have different ideas and values. So it doe snot
see people as just some blob which you have to make ourish like a
seed of plant that just sits there but people are actively working
themselves

REJECTION OF TRADITIONAL ECONOMICS MODEL –It is the rejection

of the economic mode of individuals acting to maximize their self-
interest heedless of relationships and emotions. and therefore does not
see the motivations of people as simply maximization of economic gain
but recognizes that it goes beyond that.

RECOGNITION OF DIVERSITY OF HUMAN NEEDS AND PRIORITIES –

It clearly recognizes that people are diverse in terms of age and the
obvious features but also in terms of their values and their priorities.
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THE CORE ELEMENTS OF THE APPROACH

(i) - CAPABILITY
DEFINITION

“The various combinations of functionings( beings and

doings) that the person can achieve. It is thus, a set of vectors of
functionings, re ecting the person’s freedom to lead one type of life or
another…to choose from possible livings.”
INEQUALITIES REEXAMINED(page no 49)

“The focus here is on the freedom that a person actually has to do this or
be that-things that he or she may value doing or being.”
IDEA OF JUSTICE(page no 232)

For example – think of it as a budget set. If you have 1000 rupees in

your pocket you can have a very nice meal, you could take a bus and see
another part of town, you could donate it to a cause that you believe in,
and you could buy something for yourself.
So, there are different ways for you to spend the amount. It is your
choice. In the similar way, Sen is trying to identify the sets of functioning
one could enjoy, could you travel home today, could you go to school
trip that you wanted to go to, could you have the mea of your choice,
could you decide to be a full time artist and give up your desk job. There
are many options and he wants to know the real freedoms, the real
options in front of people from which they can choose to do, to have and
to be what they value.
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FACTORS AFEECTING CAPABILITY –there are various factors
which affect the capability of a person, which can be –

1 Your own characteristics

2 The people around you
3 The resources and services you can draw on
4 The rights you can access
5 The institutions, structures and legal framework of society

IT DEPENDS ON-

As per sen it depends on variety of factors, namely-

1 personal characteristics
2 social arrangements

It implies that capabilities as real opportunities engulf personal abilities

as well as societal opportunities such as safety nets, social facilities and
economic opportunities. This combination produces a capability set
which refers to the various available functioning from which the person
can freely choose.

What Sen calls “capability” is determined by the different lifestyles that

an individual can choose. A capability is a person’s ability to do valuable
acts or to reach valuable states of being. It represents the alternative
combinations of things a person is able to do or be.
(ii) - FUNCTIONING

The concept of functioning is derived from the verb “to function”, which
generally means to be involved in an activity.

DEFINITION –

According to Sen(1999)-

“Functioning is an achievement
of people, that is, what they manage or succeed to be or to do.”

Thus, the de nition makes it clear that functioning refers to a person’s

achievement in the effort to do something or be somebody. So,
functioning are physical and mental states and activities that allow
people to participate in the life of their society.

TWO ASPECTS OF FUNCTIONING

BEINGS – is the physical and mental states. For example- being well
nourished, being in
Good health, being clothed and sheltered, being literate to the most
complex social achievements such as being happy, taking part in the life
of the community, having self-respect.

DOING – implies the activities through which you achieve these states
whether physical or mental.

IMPORTANCE OF FUNCTIONING ASPECT

The key is that they are observable. Capabilities cannot be measured but
functionings can be- if somebody is educated, if somebody is going to
school etc.
Sen focused on functioning in reaction to the problems that he faced
with the current focus of welfare economics which was focusing either
on resources or on utilities.

HOW FUNCTIONING DIFFERS FROM RESOUCES

Resource – capability – functioning – utility

Bike – able to ride around – ride around – happy
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 Food – able to be nourished – nourished – happy

Here Sen observes that because of human diversity it does not always
happen that way so I have a bike but I am terri ed of traf c, or I have no
eggs or I don’t have a sense of balance or my husband will not let me
ride so here I do have the resource but I do not have the capability,
functionings or utility.
Similarly, I have functioning as well, I have to ride to work but I hate it
so my utility is zero or negative.
So what Sen observes is that if we only look at the resources like a bike
we actually wont know what is important which is if people can get
around.

CAPABILITY AND FUNCTIONING- THE DIFFERENCE

They are closely related to each other, but they are distinct-
Capabilities are real notions of freedom and the real opportunities
people have to lead or achieve a certain type of life, whereas
functionings are aspects of living conditions or different achievements
in living a certain type of life.

Sen says-
“ A functioning is an achievement, whereas a capability is the
ability to achieve. Functionings are, in sense, are more directly related to
living conditions, since they are different aspects of living conditions.
Capabilities, in contrast, are notions of freedom, in the positive sense-
what real opportunities you have regarding the life you may lead.”

Sen gives the example –

“of a fasting person and a starving person.
While both encounter similar level of functioning, that is nutritional
de ciency, the fasting person has the capability to be adequately
nourished, that is to say, he/she could eat if he/she chooses to do so, while
the starving one does not have that capacity.”

(iii) - FREEDOM TO FUNCTION

For Sen it has two aspects-

The capabiity- the freedom or the opportunity to have this functioning
The process – my ability to act on behalf of what matters to me.
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 Sen observes that –Freedom is not a paper freedom; it has to be
effective freedom, a real possibility.
The rst sentence of his poverty and famine is –
“that there is no law against dying of hunger, it is not illegal, but people still
die of hunger. So having a paper freedom not to die of hunger does not mean
that you have the real freedom to be well nourished.”

2. Freedom is not maximization of choices without regard to their

quality and people’s values.
“Indeed sometimes more freedom of choice can bemuse and befuddle, and
make life more wretched.”

There was a debate in oxford with Bernard Williams and Amartya Sen
and others where they discussed that -
“what is the value of having different kinds of washing powders or toothpaste
or what kind of salad cream you want.”

So sen recognized that -

“More choices may make life more wretched.

So it is better to have fewer choices sometimes where each is valuable. So
it is not maximizing choices without regard to their quality and also for
sen each element of the set must be valuable. If having more choice means
more freedom than he said what if one of my options is to be beheaded
before dawn, and if I have that terrible option in my set than that is not
freedom, that is not capability. So each option has to be something that I
value and have reason to value.”

3. Freedom is not necessarily direct control by an individual. Groups,

states etc. can increase freedoms by public action and investment. For
example –

“government sprays a stagnant pond so that malaria mosquitoes do not roost

there and I may not have asked that but I might
have voted in the last election for that government and that action
expands my freedom, gives me the possibility not to have malaria.”

(iv) - AGENCY

Is another key concept of the sen’s approach and is wider than many
concepts of agency because the agent is not self-centered, it includes
being able to do good.
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Sen gives the example of –

having a picnic by the riverside and then a child wanders into the river
and starts drowning, so you leap into the river and you save the child.
Here you have used your agency in a valuable way to help somebody but
that has con icted with your wellbeing because now you are wet and
you have missed a relaxing lunch.

Sen recognizes the con ict but he shows that agency can be focused on
others well being and not sel shly on my own.It is people’s ability to act
on behalf of what matters to them, to be empowered, to have voice and
bring about change.

Sen in Development as freedom ,1999 says-

“Someone who acts and brings about change and whose achievements
can be judged in terms of her own values and objectives, whether or not
we access them in terms of some external criteria as well.”
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CRITICISM OF THE APPROACH

ILLIBERALISM – Libera critics of sen often identify the focus of the

capabiity approach- the ability to achieve the kind of ives we have
reason to value as problematic qabecause it appears to impose an
external vauation of the good life, whatever people may actually
value.they argue that it is not the task of JUSTICE to assess people’s
achievements, but rather to ensure the fairness of the conditions of
participation in a society. Justice should be neutral with regard to
judging different people’s conceptions of the good. But this neutrality
seems incompatible with the Capability Approach’s concern with
assessing people’s achievements, which would seem to require a much
more substantive view of what counts as a good life than one needs for
assessing general purpose resources.

UNDER THEORIZATION – critics express concern that the content

and structure of Sen’s Capability Approach is under-theorised and this
makes it unsuitable as a theory of justice. Sen does not say which
capabilities are important or how they are to be distributed: he argues
that those are political decisions for the society itself to decide. Many
philosophers have argued that without an objectively justi ed list of
valuable capabilities the nature of the life ‘we have reason to want’ is
unclear and so it is hard to identify the goal that a just society should be
aiming towards, to assess how well a society is doing, or to criticize
particular shortfalls.

EXCESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM –Sen’s emphasis on individual

effective freedom as the focal concern of the Capability Approach has been
criticized as excessively individualistic.

Sen’s approach only considers states of affairs and social arrangements

in terms of how good or bad they are for an individual’s well-being and
freedom (Gore 1997).

Martha Nussbaum, for example, points out that a just society requires
balancing and even limiting certain freedoms, such as regarding the16
expression of racist views, and in order to do so must make
commitments about which freedoms are good or bad, important or
trivial (Nussbaum 2003).
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 INFORMATION GAPS - Sen’s Capability Approach is founded on the
idea that much more information about the quality of human lives can
and should be taken into account in evaluating them.

The Capability Approach is supposed to be interested in assessing how

people fare on many dimensions of life including some which seem very
dif cult to obtain information about, such as people’s real choice sets or
such complicated capabilities as the ability to appear in public without
shame or to form relationships with others. It also requires detailed
information on the real inter-personal variations in translating
commodities into functionings. It is not clear however that such
informational ambitions could ever be realized. Furthermore even the
effort of trying to collect such detailed information about people’s lives
and their ‘real’ disabilities can be seen as invasive.
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CONCLUSION

Capability approach, instead of economic growth indicators, to

evaluate the development of nations. The capability approach is a
broad normative framework for the evaluation of individual well-being
and social arrangements. It designs policies and proposals about
social change in society.

Sen’s approach can be used to evaluate several aspects of people’s

well-being, such as inequality or poverty. In the process of human
development, the capability approach focuses on what people are
effectively able to do and to be, that is, on their capabilities. This
approach makes a distinction between the means and the ends of
that is, their effective opportunities to undertake the activities that they
want to engage in and to be whoever they want to be.

The capability approach is sensitive to structural and psychological

injustices. Some kinds of injustices, such as group stigmas and
stereotypes, oppressive discursive norms, and group segregation
caused by shunning interfere with individual abilities to stand as equals
in society. The capability approach focuses on the evaluation of social
norms which affect the ability of individuals to convert their resources
into functionings. It recognizes these injustices and suggests remedies.
Thus, it is not enough to give resources or opportunities such as safety
nets, free education and economic entitlements; they may not be able to
convert them into functionings, more speci cally to enhance their state
of being and doing. It is here that the capability approach as an
evaluative tool can be used to critique social and cultural traditions
which act as blockade to the people facing injustice to realize their well-
being. Public discussion may be introduced in the communities so
as to bring awareness to people regarding dignity of human person.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://youtube.com
https://www.researchgate.net
www.investopedia.com
www.proquest.com
https://en.wikipedia.org
https://iep.utm.edu