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What is Capability Approach? Explained

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Content

  1. Introduction
  2. Capability Approach: The Concept
  3. Capability Space
  4. Capability Approach in Practice
  5. Capability Approach: Conclusion

Introduction

Amartya Sen's attempt to depart from the standard utilitarian framework for developing a development strategy is known as the Capability Approach. The idea of development with various objectives is substituted for the customary income-led interpretation of development in this strategy. It has aided in the creation of a multifaceted framework for analyzing poverty and supporting the importance of agency in development strategies.

Capability Approach: The Concept

The concept of evaluating well-being has its roots in the evaluation of resources and utility, but according to Sen (1985), this may be deceptive. Instead, it is important to consider how people's independence and decision-making influence their level of well-being. Sen's capability approach acknowledges that individuals' capacities to convert products and services into worthwhile accomplishments vary depending on their personal, societal, and geographic circumstances.

The following are some problems with the traditional evaluation approach for development framework that Sen's capability approach brought to light:
  1. Individuals can have different abilities to change similar resources into valuable functioning’s. Evaluation focussing on means without acknowledging what different people can do with them will be misleading.
  2. Individuals can internalize the deprivation in order to stop desiring, what they can never achieve. This is called adaptive preferences e.g. a chronic-sick person may develop a defence system of declaring his/her health fine. Hence evaluation which focus on the subjective mental metrics without taking into account, the perspective of a neutral observer in an objective situation, will be insufficient.
  3. Individuals may or may not take up the option that they possess, while they have valuable options. It’s a function of Choice (functioning) and Capability (effective freedom)
  4. Every individual’s reality is complex and multi-dimensional hence every evaluation should acknowledge this complexity and consider its multidimensional aspect into its parameters.
The capability approach aims to address all of these multiple perspectives on issues, which gives us the idea of human well-being. It is an evaluative instrument to construct and then analyze such social aberrations rather than a theory to understand poverty or human well-being. Sen argues that it is crucial to recognize what people are genuinely capable of. This strategy places a clear emphasis on the Quality of Life that a person can accomplish. The phrases "functioning" and "capacity" are used to denote this quality of life.
  • Functionings are states of ‘being and doing’, “it is an achievement of a person: what he or she manages to do or be, and any such functioning reflects , as it were, a part of the state of that person”
  • - Capabilities denotes the set of valuable functions that an individual have effective access to. This refers to the freedom that people possess in order to achieve the lifestyle that they have reason to value(Sabina Alkire, 2007).

Therefore, in order to accurately assess well-being, it must be done within the bounds of capabilities rather than just functionings, and opportunities rather than accomplishments should be taken into account. For instance, a person who starves due to fasting vs a person who starves due to lack of access to food would function at the same level of deprivation, but concentrating on their capabilities, such as availability to food, will offer us an accurate picture. 2009's The Human Development and Capability Approach In order to comprehend the concept of freedom, Sen has concentrated on the need of both wellbeing and agency. All of the goals that a person cherishes for their well-being are referred to as their well-being freedom. While agency freedom refers to a person's ability to make decisions based on what they value. Personal, social, and environmental factors are three additional categories that can be used to further divide agency freedom. Therefore, any assessment should consider more than simply an individual's wellbeing and take into account how that person claims his or her capacity to realize important choices.

The Capability Approach departs from the traditional evaluation methodology in favor of a more comprehensive, multifaceted approach to comprehending poverty and suffering.

Capability Space

In order to use capability approach in formulating a developmental framework, one needs more concrete understanding of capabilities. Listing the dimension of well-being to generate concrete indicators and examine individuals’ freedom of choice, would have again limited the scope of infusing personal and structural factors into the evaluation process. To circumvent this, few authors have shifted Capabilities to Capability Space. This includes Individual’s Choice, Ability and Opportunity to convert resources into valuable functionings. Capability Space also acknowledges personal, local and structural factors in the evaluation process.(Frediani, 2010)

Now we will see the three components of Capability Space:
  • Choice: Do people have alternatives for transportation such as Bus? Do they use bike because they don’t have any other option or will they ride it by choice?
  • - Ability & Opportunity: Are people physically fit to ride a bike (personal factor), or are women allowed to ride a bike in the neighbourhood (local factor) and lastly, are roads in good condition to ride a bike on (structural factor).
Such conversion elements will aid in our understanding of the valuable functions attained by people, including mobility, the generating of income through greater mobility, or the achievement of inner peace. As a result, the capabilities approach uses a multi-dimensional evaluation method. It draws attention to the limitations of one-dimensional metrics like money, which can hide very large gaps in people's lives. E.g. an athlete who is illiterate. The capability approach contends that rather than making up for this lack of capabilities with the addition of others, such as income, action must be taken to rectify it.

It is possible to utilize the capability approach to evaluate fundamental capabilities even if it is a highly information-demanding strategy and necessitates a thorough consensus on what all capabilities are regarded useful. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has been releasing yearly Human Development Reports since 1990; these reports are based in part on the capability approach. Additionally, several nations use the same technological framework to publish their country-specific Human Development Reports, but they contextualize the tools according to the local and political aspects of the nation. Therefore, the Capability Approach is not only a common evaluation tool for many researchers, public actors, and policymakers around the world but also a part of curricula across disciplines such as developmental studies, welfare economics, and similar. (2006) Robeyns

Capability Approach in Practice

It's not necessary for the capacity approach to be entirely founded on empirical research techniques. Additionally, it could be founded on analytical or critical reasoning. However, because of its multidimensional nature, it is frequently used with empirical research techniques. Many studies have used the already-existing data-sets, including the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and similar ones, when using it with empirical research methodologies. However, the purpose of collecting these data was not to record functionings.

People have used participatory methods to decide on the functioning and its impact on their well-being for qualitative research methodologies. For instance, Alkire evaluated the effects on the community of three development initiatives in Pakistan.

The capability approach has been applied in numerous research processes; now, let's examine whether its use has added anything new to the established methods of assessments, evaluations, or policy recommendations.

Currently there are nine major types of capability approach applications:
  1. Assessment of Human Development in a Country 
  2. Assessment of Small-scale development projects 
  3. Identification of poor people in a developing economy. 
  4. Assessment of Poverty and Well-being in advanced economies 
  5. Deprivation-analysis of PWDs in a Society 
  6. Gender-inequality Assessment 
  7. Public Policy Analysis 
  8. Critiques of Social Practices, Norms and Discourse 
  9. Use of Capabilities and Functioning as a concept in a non-normative research framework

Assessment of Human Development in a Country

Many nations analyze and determine their nation's HDI using the capabilities approach. Sen first assessed a few nations based on their GNP per capita before adding criteria like life expectancy and literacy rate. This is when the capacity approach was first used. Both analyses' findings were remarkably different. When comparing countries merely based on GNP per capita, such as Brazil, Mexico was far superior to Sri Lanka and India, but when these countries were compared for life expectancy and infant mortality, Mexico outperformed Brazil. Such differences demonstrated how inadequate one-dimensional parameters, like income growth, are at capturing human well-being. Using this knowledge, UNDP developed the HDI concept, which compares the development quotients of all nations by measuring three fundamental aspects of human well-being: life expectancy at birth, literacy rate, and adjusted GDP per capita. The HDI makes some extremely intriguing observations on how economic growth can occasionally give us a false impression of a country's development. For instance, in 2004, the UAE placed 23rd in terms of GDP per capita ranking, but when rated for HDI, UAE ranked 46th due to the low literacy rate.

Small-scale Development Projects Evaluation

In order to analyze the three small-scale development initiatives in Pakistan—goat rearing, female literacy classes, and rose garland production—Alkire adopted the capacity approach. In a typical situation, the economic impact of each intervention would have been used to analyze the cost-benefit of these programs. The goat-rearing effort would have stood out as the finest, and female literacy would have been the least effective. The female literacy project, however, was rated as the best of the three projects when Alkire took into account non-income based functionings like knowledge, empowerment, and satisfaction. This is largely because of the non-quantifiable effects like gaining new knowledge, becoming more aware of one's rights, and feeling empowered. Such intangible repercussions would have been ignored in a typical scenario if a pure economic analysis based on quantitative research technique had been used. This demonstrates the value of using the capabilities approach when evaluating development projects to determine their true impact.

Identifying the impoverished in developing countries

Any society's poverty can be analyzed and identified using the capability approach. It has been demonstrated that income-led criteria frequently miss the presence of poverty and its different manifestations. Few scholars have attempted to investigate the relationship between income and some fundamental aspects of human well-being, such as child nutrition, health, and education. Income was discovered to be an insufficient factor for capturing the deficit of the aforementioned welfare functioning. Instead, it was discovered that all of these fundamental functions were reliant on a number of variables, including household, social structure, and geographical features, rather than being linearly related to wealth. This proves that not all characteristics of deprivation, which can also be a result of structural inequality, can be seen via the lens of income-based poverty. We cannot provide a framework for initiatives to reduce poverty unless we take a holistic approach to understanding deprivation.

Evaluation of Poverty and Welfare in Advanced Economies

The capability approach is utilized in both advanced and emerging economies to understand the demographics of the poor and to design solutions for reducing poverty. Whether the official poor were truly functioning poor or not was examined by Alessandro Balestrino. He also included a sample size of people who weren't considered to be poor in his work. He compared the functionings of both the poor and non-poor groups and discovered that a significant number of the officially non-poor were actually functioning poor, such as having no access to healthcare or education. Therefore, to alleviate the deprivation of those who are considered to be not poor, the government may enhance the composition of kind transfers rather than monetary transfers.

Analysis of PWDs' deprivation in a Society

People with disabilities (PWD) struggle with the dual problems of low income and poor functioning. In addition to earning less than persons without disabilities, they also need more to survive due to their particular demands than the average person does. Income-led evaluation can address the first aspect of financial deprivation in this regard, but a deeper study, such as a capacity approach, is needed to comprehend the deprivation that a PWD feels as a result of their disability. When these additional costs of disability were taken into account in research, the findings differed from those of the traditional economic evaluation; for example, many PWD who were previously not regarded as being officially poor were found to be living below the poverty line in the current study. Again, this is only the material part of the deprivation; a thorough investigation into non-materialistic functionings like quality of life may reveal a number of additional deprivations, such as a lack of social connection or leisure time.

Assessment of gender inequality

To highlight the relative susceptibility of particular groups in a society, the capability method can be applied. Sen had looked at gender inequality in India in his initial example. He had taken into account a few functionings, including health, mortality, and morbidity, and discovered that women had less personal well-being than males did as a result of social and political aspects of the society. Several feminist academics improved on this strategy by adding to the list of capabilities that should be examined for assessing gender disparity. According to this list, "life and physical health, mental well-being, bodily integrity and safety, social relationships, political empowerment, education and knowledge, paid work, domestic work and nonmarket work, shelter and environment, mobility, leisure activities, time autonomy, respect, and religion" were all important factors. We were able to determine that the biggest gap still primarily exists in the field of paid work combined with domestic work/care as a result of such research work. Such studies support the advancement of women's rights and the creation of laws and plans aimed at reducing the disparity between men and women in society.

Public Policy Analysis

The capability method is useful for discussing policies and determining their applicability to the targeted population rather than only for giving ideas for social policy measures. It is useful for evaluating the fundamental tenets underpinning the country's welfare system.

Critique of Social Practices, Norms and Discourse

Many academics have examined and critiqued a variety of social practices, norms, and discourses using the capacity method. Social norms may support behaviors that deny particular parts or groups. Due to these social practices, such as the gap in the freedom given to men and women to select between labor and care work, their skill sets are diminished. These are a by-product of cultural tradition and social conventions that feminist welfare state thinkers have overturned to ensure that these facets of society do not harm a person's wellbeing on the basis of gender.

Use of Capabilities and Functioning as a concept in a non-normative research framework

Last but not least, the capacity method has also been applied to non-normative research, such as explanatory analysis and ethnographic research.

Capability Approach: Conclusion 

The capability approach is a comprehensive tool that gives economics a "sociological turn." An interdisciplinary technique known as the capability approach is used to research social concerns like wellbeing, justice, inequality, and public policies. However, many academics frequently criticize the capability approach for being overly individualized and leaving the collective capabilities untapped.

This method also encourages public involvement in the process, however technologies that encourage it frequently suffer from "tyranny of the majority" or deliberative democracy. It becomes a crucial duty to guarantee that everyone participates equally in the process while also encouraging engagement.

Thirdly, the capacity method is frequently used to information that was not originally gathered to assess functioning or capability. As a result of the biases in the data, the results are therefore likely to be limited.

Therefore, even if the capability approach is a fantastic tool, it should not be utilized in place of other well-established methodologies; rather, it should be used in conjunction with them to add a more comprehensive and humanistic perspective to the research and findings.
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