The Capability Approach in Practice

A New Ethics in Setting Development Agendas

Morten Fibieger Byskov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429000560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book develops a philosophical framework for selecting goals for development purposes. This inclusive and democratic framework integrates a variety of resources including philosophical theory, empirical analysis, stakeholder deliberations, local knowledge, and advice from development experts. The author contends that we must provide good reasons and arguments in order to justify a particular development agenda. That is, we need to ask why we choose certain kinds of development goals over others, why we include certain agents in the selection process and not others, and why we select goals through one method rather than another.

In response to these questions, the author argues that development should aim at expanding people's capabilities and functionings. Capabilities and functionings—capabilities that have been realized—tell us what people are actually able to do and be with their resources, goods, and formal freedoms. He advances the view that local stakeholders should have more authority in deciding what a development agenda looks like. This claim to local authority in development can be interpreted both as a claim to political authority and expert authority. Finally, the author argues that ad hoc, foundational, procedural, and mixed (multi-stage) methods need to be synthesized in order to select the best capabilities and functionings for development.

The Capability Approach in Practice provides a philosophical and systematic approach to setting development agendas. It is an important contribution to the literature on the capability approach and development ethics, which will appeal to a broad range of scholars within philosophy and development studies.

1 The Importance of Development Agendas

What do we mean when we talk about development? Admittedly, this is an equivocal and ambiguous question at best. Alkire and Deneulin (2009, 1), for example, highlight some of the many meanings of ‘development’:

For some, development means more material prosperity: owning money, land, and a house. For others, development concerns liberation from oppression. Some see development as a new word for neo-colonialism, and despise it. For still others, development is a holistic project of personal, social and spiritual progress. In many contexts we speak of the “development” of a child or the “development” of new software as if development completes something as yet unfinished.

This book is not about the psychosocial development of children or about software development. Rather, the sense of development I am concerned with here are the personal, social, environmental, economic, and institutional circumstances that make up human life and that can be the subject of academic and political discussions as well as of public policy-making. Yet even in this narrowed-down sense of development there are as many approaches to development as there are ethical theories, each with their own view on what successful development is. Successful development could be equated with economic growth, for example, or be achieved through green technologies and sustainable living. For others, development concerns merely extreme cases of deprivations and should primarily aim to secure that people (especially in developing countries, war zones, and catastrophe areas) have adequate conditions for survival.

One particular aspect of development is the selection, definition, and formulation of the goals that development should achieve. In this book, I shall follow the example of the United Nations (UN) and refer to the set of goals, aims, and targets that development should achieve (or at the very least pursue) as a development agenda. Accordingly, a development agenda, as I shall define it here, is a normative convention, agreement, decree, or aspiration that specifies a set of goals that should be achieved by international, national, and local development efforts, such as concrete development interventions and projects, as well as national public policies.

Since their adoption in 2000, the global development agenda has primarily been driven by the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs; Vandemoortele 2012; Fukuda-Parr 2012, 2–4). The MDGs aimed to set out concrete goals and targets representing the commitments made in the Millennium Declaration (United Nations 2000), which includes the eradication of extreme poverty, gender equality, and global education (United Nations 2015b). Although much progress has been made, the extent to which the development community has achieved the MDGs is less clear and often depends on how the data are interpreted (Vandemoortele 2012; Fukuda-Parr 2012, 9). The end of 2015 was the self-imposed deadline for achieving the MDGs. Recent years have thus seen a fierce debate about how to advance toward a post-2015 development agenda. Within the UN system, this debate has resulted in the proposal for and adoption of a new set of goals, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which promise to address the shortcomings of the MDGs.

In this book, I start from the discussions on a post-2015 development agenda and consider what is at stake when selecting the relevant goals for a development agenda in general and in relation to a post-2015 agenda in particular. I propose to take a step back to consider three fundamental questions that relate to the task of selecting development goals. First, what kinds of goals should a development agenda adopt? Second, who should decide what goals are included on the development agenda? And third, how should we select and specify these goals? In asking and answering these questions, the book contributes to the literature by setting out a comprehensive and inclusive framework for selecting development goals in general and for a development agenda in particular.

By answering these three questions I set out what I call an integrative framework for setting development agendas. Now, we may of course ask whether the more important task of development is to set out a justifiable development agenda or, rather, to do development. While these two aspects of development ideally go in tandem, there is something to be said for the latter view: we cannot always wait around for a justifiable agenda, which may never come, in order to act. However, there are good reasons to first engage in discussions on a development agenda before we start implementing rash development initiatives. Having a justifiable development agenda on hand ensures that development efforts are coordinated and targeted rather than disparate and possibly damaging.

Why is it important that we set out such an integrative framework for setting development agendas? What is the significance of the inquiries that I will be making in this book? Why is it important to consider what will be on a development agenda, who will decide this, and how they will do so? As alluded to by Alkire and Deneulin, development efforts have been quite fragmented and incoherent. Development agendas are shaped by normative beliefs (Cooke 2004), technocratic assumptions (Chambers 1997; Ferguson 1990, 1994), and/or political interests (Easterly 2013). Throughout this book, we will see how such different approaches to development, representing distinct normative assumptions and political interests, directly or indirectly determine how a development agenda is set and what it eventually looks like.

It is imperative that we can provide good reasons and arguments for our answers to these three questions in order to justify the consequent development agenda. That is, we need to ask why we choose certain kinds of development goals over others, why we include certain agents in the selection process and not others, and why we select goals through one method rather than another. In other words, my inquiries in this book are important because they help us to determine why we demand that development efforts should achieve a certain set of goals: why do we consider this agenda a better or more justifiable guideline for development than any other?

This is the task I face in this book. To anticipate, the framework I develop in this book holds that the goals of a development agenda (a) should be conceptualized in terms of capabilities and functionings, (b) cannot arbitrarily ignore the values and preferences of the people to whom they apply, and (c) should be selected as a product of a procedure of mediated deliberation between local agents and external development experts. In the following two sections, I briefly consider the importance of each of the three fundamental questions before I provide a chapter overview, which summarizes the elements of the framework for the selection of development goals that will be developed throughout this book.

1.1 Three Fundamental Questions of Setting a Development Agenda

Before we can begin to consider what a development agenda should look like—what concrete goals it should include—we need to answer three fundamental questions. The three fundamental questions are, first, what kinds of goals a development agenda should include; second, who should be involved in setting a development agenda; and, third, how they should go about doing so. Before I summarize the framework that I set out to answer these three questions, let me briefly consider each question in order to bring out their importance and, hence, why they need to be adequately addressed.

The first question, which is the subject of Chapter 2, concerns what kinds of goals a development agenda should include. Development goals come in many shapes and sizes. For some, development should aim to provide local stakeholders with basic means and resources for human survival, such as housing, food, clean water, security, medicine, and so on. For others, development goals should reflect the most efficient investments or the initiatives that have the most positive impact on people’s lives. Yet others see development as a means to economic improvement and growth, while some hold that development goals should aim to secure socioeconomic opportunity and/or equality.

What is important to note is that our normative view of development—basic needs, economic growth, and so on—is to a large extent constitutive of a development agenda and its goals, which in turn influence concrete development initiatives, efforts, and policies. An agenda focused on basic means for human survival would not consider equal opportunity in the job market, for example, as normatively relevant, while an efficiency-focused agenda—the strategy taken up by the Gates Foundation¹—would attribute more normative weight to those goals that could give us the most return for our investment. To wit, the kinds of goals that our agenda should reflect influence the specific goals that the agenda includes and excludes.

The second question that I shall attempt to answer in this book asks who should be involved in the setting of a development agenda. This question is addressed in Chapters 3 and 4 in particular. Development involves many different stakeholders, ranging from international organizations and donor countries to national governments, NGOs, and development practitioners and the local citizens and interest groups who will ultimately be affected by the implementation of a development agenda. Each of these (groups of) stakeholders will want to have a say in the design of a development agenda. It thus becomes important to determine who has a rightful claim to take part in this process.

While the task of setting a development agenda has traditionally belonged to aid donors—those financing the development efforts—and so-called development experts, a claim that local stakeholders should be granted more authority in this regard has emerged within the development literature in recent years. The second question thus concerns on what basis local stakeholders can claim authority in the context of setting a development agenda.

As I will be using the term frequently throughout, it is important here to note that in this book I define ‘local stakeholders’ quite broadly and unspecific. Primarily the term denotes the intended beneficiaries of a development agenda. Who the intended beneficiaries are depends on the context and is something that should be specified in the process of setting out the particular agenda, as I will argue as part of the second question. Thus, as is often the case in development contexts, ‘local stakeholders’ may refer to specific indigenous peoples, socioeconomically disadvantaged communities (including in more affluent countries), inhabitants of regions exposed to (natural) risks, hazards, and conflicts, as well as, more broadly, to people in the Global South.

The third and final question that I address in this book concerns by which method we should select the goals of a development agenda. This methodological investigation will be the subject of Chapters 5 and 6. There are several different methods for the selection of development goals: we may want to base the goals on normative theory—such as a theory of justice or a human rights theory—or maybe we would like the goals to represent the subjective preferences, values, and norms of local stakeholders; we may want our method to be based on quantitative statistics or we may take a more qualitative approach.

Again, the question of the right methodology is fundamental because the method by which we select development goals has the potential to influence the specific goals of the agenda. A method based on a theory of justice, for example, would likely arrive at a list of goals that represent basic principles of justice, while a more empirically oriented method would arguably identify development goals that reflect real-life, nonideal circumstances and needs.

How we answer these three fundamental questions may crucially influence the particular list of development goals that a development agenda contains, and how we justify a particular development agenda thus to a great extent relies on how we justify the answers to the three fundamental questions. In this book, I develop and argue in support of my own framework for the setting of a development agenda, which provides answers to the three questions asked. In the following section, I provide a short overview of the framework that I will develop and defend and how it addresses the three fundamental questions.

1.2 An Inclusive Framework for the Setting of a Development Agenda

What does the framework that I set out in this book look like? How does it address the three questions I set out in the previous section? The framework that is developed in this book aims to provide an approach to setting development agendas that can integrate different sources of insight and knowledge that is relevant for development. In particular, I defend the view that local stakeholders should have a larger say in what a development agenda looks like. In this way, the framework will integrate sources such as philosophical theory, empirical analysis, stakeholder deliberations, and advice from development experts. For this reason, I label the view that I present in this book an inclusive framework for setting development agendas.

As I argued in the previous section, setting out a justifiable development agenda requires us to consider four fundamental questions. In the following, I shortly consider each question and how they will be addressed in the four main chapters of this book.

The first question I consider in this book concerns what kinds of goals we should pursue as a matter of development. Are we aiming for economic development? Do we primarily concern ourselves with the development of public institutions and social security? Is development a tool to combat structures of oppression? In Chapter 2, I argue that my framework, in order to answer the first question, would benefit from adopting the idea of human development. Human development has its origins in two academic developments in the 1970s, namely the emergence of the field of development ethics, pioneered by Denis Goulet (1971), and Amartya Sen’s (1979, 1989) capability approach. Development ethics and the capability approach both introduced a concern for human beings to the field of (economic) development. How, they asked, can we achieve development that is ethically sound or morally justified?

The capability approach especially provides an answer to this question. Rather than merely providing people with a set of resources or the basic conditions for human survival, its proponents have argued, development should aim at expanding people’s capabilities and functionings. Capabilities are defined as the real freedom that people have to do or be certain things. Functionings are capabilities that have been realized. The benefit of focusing on capabilities and functionings is that it tells us what people are actually able to do and be with their resources, goods, and formal freedoms. We are thus concerned with the ends of development rather than the means.

A focus on the means to development, to the contrary, ignores the fact that people are involuntarily subject to various factors that influence the extent to which they are able to successfully convert resources into actual opportunities or realized doings and beings. For example, a person in a wheelchair would arguably be able to do less with the same amount of economic resources than an able-bodied person. Even though they would be equally well-off in terms of means, such as economic resources, the person in the wheelchair is worse off in terms of what she can do or be with those resources simply due to the fact that she has more necessary expenses for her wheelchair, medicine, and physical therapy. In other words, in order to assess the extent to which people are well-off we need to focus on what they are able to do or be with a set of resources rather than on the amount of resources they have.

For these reasons, in this book I shall be arguing that the first element of an inclusive framework for selecting development goals should be the conceptualization of development goals in terms of capabilities and functionings—what people are able to do and be—rather than in terms of the resources, goods, and formal freedoms they possess or have access to.

The concepts of human development, capabilities, and functionings do not specify what goals are relevant for development, however. As Robeyns (2011) argues, the concept of capabilities and functionings is morally neutral:

Functionings can be univocally good (e.g., being in good health) or univocally bad (e.g., being raped). But the goodness or badness of various other functionings may not be so straightforward, but rather depend on the context and/or the normative theory we endorse.

In other words, the capability approach does not from the outset dictate which capabilities and functionings are morally relevant, whether for human development, justice, or any other domain. This underspecification and open-endedness has led capability theorists to argue that we need a selection of relevant capabilities and functionings when applying the concepts in practice (e.g., Fukuda-Parr 2003, 121; Sen 1989, 46). Selecting which capabilities and functionings are included on a list of development goals, meanwhile, raises two further questions, namely who should make the selection and how should they go about doing so?

Accordingly, the second question that I shall investigate in this book concerns who should select the relevant development goals for a development agenda. Since the largely donor- and expert-driven formulation of the MDGs in 2000, which set out the global development agenda for the following fifteen years, the fact that many developing countries have in the meantime shed their aid-dependency has ushered in a claim to grant local stakeholders greater authority in the process of setting a development agenda. In the third chapter of the book I shall investigate what I call the claim to local authority. As a working definition, I define the claim to local authority in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Importance of Development Agendas
• 2 A Capability Framework for Development Goals
• 3 A Republican Account of Local Authority in Development
• 4 Third Wave Development Expertise
• 5 Four Criteria for the Selection of Human Development Goals
• 6 Methods for the Selection of Capabilities and Functionings
• 7 An Inclusive Framework for Setting Development Agendas
• Bibliography
• Index