The Capability Approach: Its Development, Critiques and Recent Advances.

TLDR

The Capability Approach has become the leading alternative to standard economic frameworks for understanding poverty, inequality, and human development, drawing on insights from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Aristotle, and Nussbaum. Professor Sen has developed, refined, and defended this framework across numerous articles and books, addressing economic, social, and ethical questions since his 1979 Tanner Lecture.

Abstract

Over the last decade Amartya`s Sen`s Capability Approach (CA) has emerged as the leading alternative to standard economic frameworks for thinking about poverty, inequality and human development generally. In countless articles and several books that tackle a range of economic, social and ethical questions (beginning with the Tanner Lecture `Equality of What? `delivered at Stanford University in 1979), Professor Sen has developed, refined and defended a framework that is directly concerned with human capabillity and freedom (e.g. Sen, 1980; 1984; 1985; 1987; 1992; 1999). From the outset Sen acknowledged strong connections with Adam Smith`s (1776) analysis of `necessities` and living conditions and Karl Marx`s (1844) concern with human freedom and emancipation. Later Sen (1993, p. 46) recognised that `the most powerful conceptual connections` (which he initially failed to appreciate) relate to Aristotle`s theory of `political distribution` and his analysis of eudaimonia - `human flourishing` (see Nussbaum, 1988; 1990).