Capability approach

'''Capability approach '''

definition          To be included after submission of exams.

discussion        “Perhaps the most ambitious argument in favour of a liberal democratic discourse can be found in the work of Amartya Sen, whose ‘capabilities approach’ articulates the powerful idea that development entails more than improvements in national or personal income, but also the freedom to choose the life one wants to pursue, and to establish, through politics and open discourse, the moral terms on which life, development and therefore freedom may be understood and assessed” (Johnson 2009:23)

“‘A person’s capability,’ Sen (1999 [2001:75]) argues, ‘refers to the alternative combinations of functionings that are feasible for her to achieve.’ ‘Functionings,’ in turn, are ‘the various things a person may value doing or being.’ Whether or how a person is able to realize these functionings depends in large part upon a variety of personal, social and environmental factors, including health, age, illness and disability (what Sen calls ‘personal heterogeneities’), variations in rainfall, temperature, the presence of infectious diseases (‘environmental diversities’), ‘variations in social climate’ (governing, for instance the provision of public education, rates of crime, etc.), ‘differences in relational perspectives’ (covering social norms of reciprocity and welfare, and the social conditions under which individuals may ‘appear in public without shame’) and, finally, distribution within the family (Sen 1999 [2001:70-1]” (Johnson 2009:113)