CIA -1

Philosophy of Law

Amartya Sen’s “Capability Approach” to Development

and Poverty

Adithi Gurkar

1850140
What is Amartya Sen’s “Capability Approach” to Development and Poverty

In Amartya Sen’s capability approach development is seen as a process of expanding the

real freedoms of people . The capability to function is what matters the most and it goes
beyond availability of commodities. In the capability approach, poverty is a situation where
people lack the most basic capabilities to lead a reasonable life.

The Capability Approach attempts to address various concerns that Sen had about
contemporary approaches to the evaluation of well-being, namely:

(1) Individuals can differ greatly in their abilities to convert the same resources into
valuable functionings (‘beings’ and ‘doings’). For example, those with physical
disabilities may need specific goods to achieve mobility, and pregnant women have
specific nutritional requirements to achieve good health. Therefore, evaluation that
focuses only on means, without considering what particular people can do with
them, is insufficient.

(2) People can internalize the harshness of their circumstances so that they do not
desire what they can never expect to achieve. This is the phenomenon of ‘adaptive
preferences’ in which people who are objectively very sick may, for example, still
declare, and believe, that their health is fine. Therefore, evaluation that focuses only
on subjective mental metrics is insufficient without considering whether that
matches with what a neutral observer would perceive as their objective
circumstances,.

(3) Whether or not people take up the options they have, the fact that they do have
valuable options is significant. For example, even if the nutritional state of people
who are fasting and starving is the same, the fact that fasting is a choice not to eat
should be recognized. Therefore evaluation must be sensitive to both actual
achievements (‘functionings’) and effective freedom (‘capability’).

(4) Reality is complicated and evaluation should reflect that complexity rather than take
a short-cut by excluding all sorts of information from consideration in advance. For
example, although it may seem obvious that happiness matters for the evaluation of
how well people are doing, it is not all obvious that it should be the only aspect that
ever matters and so nothing else should be considered. Therefore, evaluation of how
well people are doing must seek to be as open-minded as possible. (Note: This leads
to the deliberate ‘under-theorization’ of the Capability Approach that has been the
source of some criticism, and it motivated the development of Nussbaum’s
alternative Capability Theory.)
Capability Approach: A Comprehensive Development Paradigm

In the recent decades Amartya Sen’s Capability theory has emerged as a serious alternative
model of progress and development. Rather than goods and resources (the inputs), the
focus of Sen’s capability approach is people and their capabilities (the end-results). It also
provides an alternative perspective on issues like poverty, inequality, gender bias, and social
exclusion that are hardly touched by the economic perspective.

Sen’s approach is both comprehensive and flexible. It provides dignity to human race
because the economic model of development has reduced people to the status of producers
and consumers. If the GDP growth model dis-empowers them, the capabilities approach
makes their empowerment a central issue. Rather than talking of some theoretical equality
of people or seeing them in terms of numbers, the capability approach explicitly recognizes
the differences among individuals. It also accepts that people’s abilities are affected by
external factors coming from interaction with other people, social arrangements, access to
infrastructure and public services, discriminations, opportunities to participate in social and
political activities, freedom to speak and influence state policies, and so on.

Functionings and Capabilities

Sen searched for measure to adequately represent people’s well-being and deprivation and
found that neither income and command over commodities, nor happiness and fulfillment
of desires constituted good enough indicator of human well-being or lack of it.

Sen argues that people’s well-being depends upon what they are actually capable of doing
and being. Thus, he focused on something more direct such as human functionings and
capabilities in terms of which the quality of life is analyzed. In other words, a person’s
capabilities offer a perspective in terms of which his advantages and disadvantages can be
reasonably assessed – that makes it highly appropriate for analyzing poverty.

Functionings: Functionings are what people really “do and are”. They are achievements of
people: they are ‘doings’ or ‘beings’. Taken together, these doings and beings – achieved
functionings – give value to life. The functioings may include being well-nourished, having
shelter, able to work, rest; or being literate or healthy; being part of a community or group;
being respected, and so on.
Achieving a functioning (for example, being adequately nourished) with a given bundle of
commodities (say, bread or rice) depends on a range of personal and social factors (e.g. age,
gender, activity levels, health, access to medical services, nutritional knowledge and
education, climatic conditions, and so on). A functioning therefore refers to the use a
person makes of whatever is at his/her command.
Capabilities: Capabilities are options to achieve valuable functionings; it reflects his freedom
to choose. So, capabilities refer to the set of valuable functionings that a person has
effective access to. They are best thought to be the equivalent of a person’s opportunity
set.  In nutshell, capabilities are made up of two things: functionings and the freedom to
choose from them.

Difference between Functionings and Capabilities

The distinction between functionings and capabilities is that between the realized and the
potentially possible, in other words, between achievements, on the one hand, and freedoms
or opportunities, on the other. Capabilities are a person’s real freedoms or opportunities to
achieve functionings. For example, while travelling is a functioning, the real opportunity to
travel is the corresponding capability.

Functionings refer to what people really ‘do and are’; capabilities denote what people
potentially ‘can do and can be’.  Functionings are, in a sense, more directly related to living
conditions, since they are different aspects of living conditions. Capabilities are notions of
freedom, in the positive sense: what real opportunities a person has regarding the life he
can potentially lead. Take away the freedom to choose, the two things become same.
The difference between functioning and capability can be best clarified with an example.
Consider two persons who are not eating. One is a victim of a famine in Ethiopia and the
other decided to sit on a ‘fast’ in front of the US embassy in London to protest against its
troops in Afghanistan. What distinguishes the two is the freedom, or availability of option.
The first person is badly constrained in freedom and lacks the capability to achieve the
functioning to be well-fed; the second person has this capability though he decided not to
use it.

Likewise, you are capable of driving a car – ie, you have the ability to drive a car. It becomes
a capability if you have the freedom (having the driving license, road connectivity,
availability of fuel, as well as the motivation) to use it to do things you value. So, merely
having a car or being able to drive it, by itself, does not add value to your life. You also lose
this capability if, say, you are a female and the State law doesn’t allow females to drive.

References-
Article-
Issues and Challenges in India
https://socialissuesindia.wordpress.com/2013/09/06/what-is-amartya-sens-capability-
approach-to-development/
Article-
Sen’s Capability Approach
https://www.iep.utm.edu/sen-cap/

Article-
The Capability Approach and Human Development
https://www.ophi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/OPHI-HDCA-SS11-Intro-to-the-Capability-
Approach-SA.pdf