Capabilities

Abstract

In Chapter 4, we saw the limitations of income and consumptionexpenditure approaches, both because of the difficulty (and disutility) of pricing certain goods and services and using those prices for cross-context comparison, and because of the inability of monetized approaches to take account of dimensions relevant for the assessment of severe deprivation. In Chapter 5, the basic needs approach expanded poverty conceptions and measures to include deprivations in a variety of dimensions, and measured those deprivations in appropriate units. The basic needs approach, while capable of accommodating normative concern for human agency, was frequently inattentive in practice to the importance of individual agency in both poverty assessment and anti-poverty policy. The capabilities approach, first developed by Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, and later forcefully advocated by Martha Nussbaum, among many others, is in many ways the natural successor to the basic needs approach. By focusing on the individual’s substantive freedoms to do and be the things she has reason to value, the capabilities approach places human agency at the center of evaluative exercises regarding individual advantage or disadvantage.