Ingrid Robeyns
i.robeyns <at> uva.nl
December 2002

Amartya Sen’s capability approach has attracted much attention recently, both in development and welfare economics, as well as more broadly in the social sciences and the humanities. Many advocate the capability approach as a ‘paradigm’ that is superior to standard economics for the study of well-being and development. I want to focus here on three interrelated questions. First, how does the capability approach deal with culture? Second, what are the implications of the capability approach for development policies? Third, how does the capability approach differ from mainstream economic thinking?

The capability approach advocates that a person’s well-being and indeed, societies themselves, should be judged based on people’s functionings and capabilities. Functionings are a person’s activities and her states of being, such as being well-fed, being literate, being active in the community, and so forth. Capabilities are a person’s actual opportunities to achieve these functionings. By focusing on the real opportunities that a person has to achieve these valuable states of being and doing, the capability approach shifts the focus of our evaluations away from resources like income or expenditures towards the ends of well-being. This makes the approach much more sensitive to the impact of social factors on well-being (such as social norms, gender norms, habits, traditions etc.), because all these dimensions have an impact on how well a person can convert her resources into functionings.

These social factors are important aspects of a culture. For example, a person may have abundant resources, but in a hyper-individualistic society, he may be without friends and networks of social support (which are arguably valuable functionings.) Alternatively, a person may have very few resources, but because she lives in a society with strong norms of sharing, this poor person may escape deprivation. In addition, the capability approach will always focus in inequalities within a particular community or society. For example, restrictive gender norms may make it much more difficult for a woman to convert resources into functionings than for a man.

The capability approach does not only account for culture as having an impact on the conversion of resources into functionings; it also sees cultural functionings as important functionings in their own right. Examples of such cultural functionings are engaging in cultural activities (e.g. arts, music, dance etc.), taking part in worship, festivities or other traditions. In contrast to much applied work in economics, the non-material dimensions of well-being are given as much attention as the material dimensions. This can have important implications. For example, in her comparison of a standard social cost-benefit analysis with a capability social cost-benefit evaluation of NGO projects in Pakistan, Sabina Alkire found that a project may be not very efficient in creating income, but it can be efficient in creating functionings such as being respected by and taking part in the community, having increased self-worth, being able to fulfill religious duties, and so forth.
The implications for focusing on functionings and capabilities instead of solely on material welfare have been illustrated by the Human Development Reports published by the UNDP. The Human development approach developed in these reports has been very much inspired by the capability approach. One major consequence is that for every policy proposal, one has to ask how this is going to affect the people, in all the dimensions of their well-being, not just with respect to income creation.

In my view, the capability approach is a genuinely interdisciplinary paradigm. Because it was developed by a highly respected economist, and because it uses vocabulary that is not too alien for mainstream economists, the capability approach offers us a unique chance to foster cross-disciplinary work and policy making. So far, however, it looks like the capability approach has attracted more attention by non-mainstream economists, philosophers and other social scientists. This can probably be explained by the fact that the capability approach is much more ‘verbal’ than ‘mathematical’, and its underlying philosophical and methodological principles do not naturally lend themselves to highly abstract modeling, especially not if simplified or stylized assumptions are used. Applications of the capability approach are also much richer with respect to the information that they use, but this is done at the costs of not being able to construct simple models, nor being able to conduct full measuring or construct full rankings. The more an economist (or an economic community such as a particular faculty) values minimalist models, or parsimony, the more difficult it will be to work within the capability paradigm in a non-reductionist way, and to account for culture in a sufficiently rich understanding.

Postscript September 2004:
For more information and references on the capability approach, see
www.capabilityapproach.org
www.hd-ca.org