For Sen (1999), development involves reducing deprivation or broadening choice.

Deprivation represents a multidimensional view of poverty that includes hunger, illiteracy,

illness and poor health, powerlessness, voicelessness, insecurity, humiliation, and a lack of
access to basic infrastructure (Narayan et al. 2000, pp. 4-5).

For Sen (1999), freedom (not development) is the ultimate goal of economic life as well as the
most efficient means of realizing general welfare. Overcoming deprivations is central to
development.
Unfreedoms include hunger, famine, ignorance, an unsustainable economic life, unemployment,
barriers to economic fulfilment by women or minority communities, premature death, violation
of political freedom and basic liberty, threats to the environment, and little access to health,
sanitation, or clean water. Freedom of exchange, labour contract, social opportunities, and
protective security are not just ends or constituent components of development but also
important means to development and freedom.

Sen's welfare theory relies not on individuals' attainments (of basic needs) but individuals'
capabilities.

Sen focuses on a small number of basic functionings central to well-being, such as being
adequately nourished, avoiding premature mortality, appearing in public without shame, being
happy, and being free.

For Sen (1992, pp. 102-116), poverty is not low well-being but the inability to pursue well-
being because of the lack of economic means.

The capability approach was first developed by Amartya Sen in the 1980s (Sen 1985). The
fundamental basis of this approach is the creation of freedoms or capabilities to enable
individuals to live a life in which they have choice.

In broad terms, the capability approach comprises a number of elements primarily concerned
with enabling the capabilities of individuals to live a life that they value and make the choices
that fulfil them.
According to Sen, when examining well-being, the most important factor to consider is what
individuals are able to be or to do; which Sen labels ‘functionings’.

Functionings are activities or ‘doings’ or ‘states of being’ that can be assumed (Sen 2000). For
example, ‘states of being’ may include being healthy, being well nourished, being famished,
being literate or being able to socialise. Whereas ‘doings’ may include getting a job, taking a
holiday, voting or running for public office.
While functionings describe what individuals are able to be or to do, capabilities describe
the freedoms of choice or opportunities available to achieve these functionings.

Therefore, an individual’s capabilities represents their capacity to choose between various

functionings to create a life they value. However, the capability set outlined by Sen is not merely
a description of the functionings currently available to a person, but a set of functionings from
which a person should have the ability to choose (Martins 2006).

Therefore well-being should be measured by the capabilities of an individual, not their

functionings, and should identify opportunities, not merely their achievements (Frediani 2010;
Sen 1992). It is only when functionings and capabilities are examined together that a true
understanding of the context is formed.

Sen has consistently refused to prescribe a predetermined list of core capabilities on the basis
that doing so would undermine the fundamental understanding of his capability approach (Sen
2004). That is, that the capabilities need to be tailored to the specific context and depend upon
personal value judgments (Clark 2005).

In this regard Nussbaum disagrees with Sen’s position. Table 7.1 highlights ten central
capabilities that Nussbaum considers to be the minimum necessary requirements that every state
should offer each citizen (Alkire 2002).

The capability approach provides an answer to the question ‘what constitutes development’.
Within the capability approach the purpose of development is to improve the lives of individuals
within a community. While this does not differ from the development objective of the human
rights framework, what does differ is what comprises this improvement. Within the human rights
framework, poverty is viewed as the deprivation of human rights. Therefore development is seen
as the fulfilment of human rights. However, as noted earlier, there are issues with viewing
development in this way. Alternatively, the capability approach views the improvement of
peoples’ lives as the expansion of individuals’ capabilities. It is in expanding these capabilities
that people have the capacity to live a life in which they have choice.

Within the perspective of human rights the scope of development extends to fulfilling an
individual’s human right, there is no mention of the role of development beyond the attainment
of these rights. However, the scope of development within the capability approach extends to
include any capabilities that improve the lives of individuals. These capabilities are not confined
to an established list but rather determined by the desires of the community. This is an important
element that allows the capability approach to be operationalised more easily than the human
rights framework.
Amartya Sen’s closely argued book is a compelling invitation to rethink the way we
conceptualize the problems of deprived countries and populations. A discourse centered on
levels of income is inadequate and misleading, Sen argues. The relief of poverty is not an end in
itself, but a means to allow people full lives. If the goal of promoting development is for poor
people to achieve basic human freedoms, then we should concentrate on that central objective
rather than on the usual proxies for successful development, such as increases in gross national
product (GNP) or per capita income. Substantive freedoms are for Sen constitutive of
development, while development itself is thoroughly dependent on the achievement of
substantive freedoms. This achievement is both an end and a means to that end. Sen considers
five basic human freedoms. These are

(1) political freedoms (opportunities for people to determine who governs them);
(2) economic facilities (opportunities to use economic resources for the purposes of
consumption, production, or exchange);
(3) social opportunities (for such resources as health care and education);
(4) transparency guarantees (the freedom for people to deal with each other under conditions of
disclosure and lucidity); and
(5) protective security (including safety net provisions for the unemployed and indigent). Sen
contrasts his position to the “school of hard knocks,” which holds that such substantive freedoms
should be secondary to a primary concern for “getting the economy going.” Getting the economy
going will not necessarily achieve broader goals: “For example, the citizens of Gabon or South
Africa or Namibia or Brazil may be much richer in terms of per capita GNP than the citizens of
Sri Lanka or China or the state of Kerala in India, but the latter have very substantially higher
life expectancies than do the former” (pp. 5–6). To use an American example, African
Americans as a group are very many times richer in income terms than the people of China or
Kerala, even when adjusting for cost-of-living differences, but they have a lower chance of
reaching an advanced age than people in either of those places.

While both China and India have moved to a more open economy, China has achieved more
success in growth because of prior commitments to basic health and education services. So the
Chinese people, because they were better educated and healthier, were more able to take
advantage of market opportunities than the people of India.

Democracy also has a direct role in promoting human capabilities, an instrumental role that
enables people to express and support their claims for political attention and a constructive role
that allows people to participate in the conceptualization of need.

Sen concludes his tour de force with a reiteration of his basic arguments. “While economic
prosperity helps people to have wider options and lead more fulfilling lives, so do more
education, better health care, finer medical attention, and other factors that causally influence the
effective freedoms that people actually [get to] enjoy” (p. 295).

Introduction

The human development and capability approach (in brief: ‘capability approach’1) aspires to re-
orient approaches to socio-economic development and public policy, away from taking economic
growth and/or declared subjective well-being as the overriding objectives, and towards
improving the ability of persons to lead a life that they have reason to value.

He argues that at the very root of development or poverty is the question of whether any
expansion among the individuals’ freedoms has taken place and he claims that this perspective,
which he calls the capability perspective, is a better basis for evaluating the level of development
of any community than economic or technological progress would be. If the expansion of
freedoms is indeed crucial for development, then political, economic and social institutions
should all contribute synergistically to the process of development in and through enhancing and
sustaining individual freedoms.

Freedom, capabilities and development

Development, for Sen, takes place as a process that aims at expanding substantive freedoms and
this can come about only through the intervention of human agency.2 But human agency can be
exercised only in a climate of freedom. Development, therefore, aims at freedom using the very
exercise of free human agency as the very means to achieve it. Freedom, in Sen’s mind, is a
“multilayered” term.3 He calls constitutive freedom that which provides the individual the
capability to act as an agent.

Human agency understood as the exercise of constitutive freedom, however, is not dependent on
individual capability alone. Take the case of an individual who possesses the capability to work
but is impeded by the lack of “adequate” job opportunities for instance. He has somehow been
capability-deprived and put in a condition of unfreedom. Eventually, this situation of
unemployment translates to deprivation of income or economic poverty. It is worth noting,
however, that the situation of unemployment due to lack of “adequate” job opportunities is
actually caused by the interplay of political, social and economic forces working through
structures and institutions where individuals find themselves bound in some way. Freedom and
capability then are also dependent on such factors which are external to the individual because
they can provide space for the exercise of agency and thus instrumentally cause the expansion or
diminution of individual capabilities.

Sen holds the opinion that there exists a deep complementarity between individual agency and
forces of social arrangements and this relationship has to be considered carefully in the
evaluation and the crafting of development programs. He states that in order to counter the
problems development brings with it, “we have to see individual freedom as a social
commitment”. Sen repeatedly underscores the idea that what people can positively achieve, i.e.
individual capability, is enhanced by the presence of economic opportunities, political liberties,
social powers, and the enabling conditions of good health, basic education, and the
encouragement and cultivation of initiatives. But social institutional arrangements for these
opportunities are likewise influenced by the exercise of individual freedoms, through liberty to
participate democratically in social choice and the making of public decisions that impel the
progress of these opportunities as well. So, viewing individual freedom as a social commitment
implicates the avowal of the individual towards effecting social structures and institutions
favoring individual freedom as well as the directing the wheels of political, economic, social and
civic structures towards guaranteeing the freedom of individual agency. Development therefore
depends upon the creation of a stable cycle of a capability enabling environment and enabled
individual exercise of agency with social impact.

Sen analyzes the relation of wealth to development. Even as he insists on the perspective of
pursuing development through expanding individual capabilities, he acknowledges that wealth in
general or incomes in particular indeed relates positively to the ability of persons to live the life
they choose to live. But it does not necessarily follow that having money absolutely guarantees a
full and healthy life. One ultimately desires a full life as his end and wealth is merely one means
at his disposal to achieve that. Though wealth enables one to live a life that allows him to freely
pursue what he desires in accordance to what he values, it cannot free him completely from
suffering illness or disabilities, or a premature death, e.g. because of the high rate of criminality
in the place where he lives. Sen purports that aside from wealth, these conditions also impinge on
development. The task of development thus is two-fold: (1) One focuses on the process of
diminishing the conditions that obstruct the unimpeded exercise of pursuing the life one
chooses to live, and (2) the other focuses on the opportunities of augmenting the variety of
choices to allow one the freedom to actually choose. As earlier mentioned, development is
interested in enabling persons as free agents to exercise rationally this capacity of pursuing
the life they desire to live. In the first case, development has something to do with facilitating
the exercise of freedom as means while the second case sees development as facilitating the
acquisition of freedom as an end. Using the language Sen uses, he would state that
development involves both processes and opportunities.
What are the factors that wield causal influences on both the processes and opportunities people
have for good living? Sen insists that availability of money is indeed crucial for without money,
one may not have a wide array of choices and thus have limited opportunity to actually choose.
However, even when resources abound, good living may be affected by lack of political freedom
to participate in democratic exercises, economic controls over market mechanisms, deficient
social security provisions, poor transparency guarantees in transactions leading to transgressions
of trust and various forms of injustices. Unlike more traditional economic theories that focused
more on considering the influence of incomes, wealth and utilities on development, Sen shifts the
focus on freedom.
Ultimately, the freedom of individuals is considered as the building block of development. The
degree of development of a certain society is evaluated according to what kind of freedoms the
individual constituents are given and what they actually exercise. At the same time, the very
exercise of freedom the individual constituents are granted determine the extent they effect the
process itself of development as its principal agent. Where such freedoms are lacking, there
poverty prevails.

The perspective of development as freedom aims at guaranteeing the individuals’ substantive

freedoms as their importance is fundamental in achieving a humanly enriching quality of life.
These substantive freedoms include elementary capabilities like being able to avoid deprivations
as starvation, undernourishment, escapable morbidity and premature mortality as well as
freedoms associated with being literate and numerate, enjoying political participation and
uncensored speech and so on. Development as a process entails expanding these human
freedoms. Thus development is assessed as regards the extent these human freedoms are present
in a pervasive and stable manner. However, the achievement of freedom is also important as a
means as it is instrumental to the expansion of human freedom thus promoting development as
well. The instrumental role of freedom is grounded on the fact that the different kinds of rights,
opportunities and entitlements are empirically linked with one another such that freedom of one
type may greatly advance the freedom of other types. Sen enumerates five types of these so-
called instrumental freedoms: (1) political freedoms, (2) economic facilities, (3) social
opportunities, (4) transparency guarantees and (5) protective security. Each of these components
as instrumental freedoms have characteristic institutional structures and autonomous internal
mechanisms, but they present opportunities and entitlements directed to the same individuals
living within a specific socio-cultural milieu.

Development can be seen as a process of expanding the freedoms that people enjoy. And if
freedom is what development is about then it makes sense to concentrate on that rather than on
some of the means or instruments of achieving it.

This approach contrasts with others such as identifying development with the growth of GNP,
rise in personal incomes, or with industrialisation, technological advance, or social
modernisation. These are all important but are means and not ends.

Freedoms depend also on other determinants e.g. social and economic arrangements (e.g.
education and health facilities), political and civil rights.

Development requires the removing of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny,
poor economic opportunities as well as social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as
intolerance. The world has unprecedented opulence and yet denies freedoms to vast numbers of
people.

Freedoms are not only the primary ends of development, they are also among its principal
means. There are five distinct types of freedom, seen in this instrumental perspective: 1.political
freedoms,2. economic facilities, 3. social opportunities, 4. transparency guarantees, 5.protective
security.
In strictly economic terms, development has traditionally meant achieving sustained rates of
growth of income per capita to enable a nation to expand its output at a rate faster than the
growth rate of its population.

With few exceptions, such as in development policy circles in the 1970s, development was until
recently nearly always seen as an economic phenomenon in which rapid gains in overall and per
capita GNI growth would either “trickle down” to the masses in the form of jobs and other
economic opportunities or create the necessary conditions for the wider distribution of the
economic and social benefits of growth. Problems of poverty, discrimination, unemployment,
and income distribution were of secondary importance to “getting the growth job done.” Indeed,
the emphasis is often on increased output, measured by gross domestic product (GDP).

During the 1970s, economic development came to be redefined in terms of the reduction or
elimination of poverty, inequality, and unemployment within the context of a growing economy.
“Redistribution from growth” became a common slogan. Dudley Seers posed the basic question
about the meaning of development succinctly when he asserted

A number of developing countries experienced relatively high rates of growth of per capita
income during the 1960s and 1970s but showed little or no improvement or even an actual
decline in employment, equality, and the real incomes of the bottom 40% of their populations.
By the earlier growth definition, these countries were developing; by the newer poverty, equality,
and employment criteria, they were not.

the “capability to function” is what really matters for status as a poor or non-poor person. As Sen
puts it, “the expansion of commodity productions...are valued, ultimately, not for their own sake,
but as means to human welfare and freedom.”8

what matters fundamentally is not the things a person has—or the feelings these provide—
but what a person is, or can be, and does, or can do.

To make any sense of the concept of human well-being in general, and poverty in particular, we
need to think beyond the availability of commodities and consider their use: to address what Sen
calls functionings, that is, what a person does (or can do) with the commodities of given
characteristics that they come to possess or control. Freedom of choice, or control of one’s own
life, is itself a central aspect of most understandings of well-being. A functioning is a valued
“being or doing,” and in Sen’s view, functionings that people have reason to value can range
from being healthy, being well-nourished, and well-clothed, to being mobile, having self-esteem,
and “taking part in the life of the community.”9

Sen then defines capabilities as “the freedom that a person has in terms of the choice of
functionings, given his personal features (conversion of characteristics into functionings) and his
command over commodities.”14 Sen’s perspective helps explain why development economists
have placed so much emphasis on health and education, and more recently on social inclusion
and empowerment, and have referred to countries with high levels of income but poor health and
education standards as cases of “growth without development.”14a Real income is essential, but
to convert the characteristics of commodities into functionings, in most important cases, surely
requires health and education as well as income.

People living in poverty are often deprived—at times deliberately— of capabilities to make
substantive choices and to take valuable actions, and often the behavior of the poor can be
understood in that light. For Sen, human “well-being” means being well, in the basic sense of
being healthy, well nourished, well clothed, literate, and long-lived, and more broadly, being
able to take part in the life of the community, being mobile, and having freedom of choice in
what one can become and can do.

We can after all fall back on the supposition that increases in national income, if they are faster
than the population growth, sooner or later lead to the solution of social and political problems.
But the experience of the past decade makes this belief look rather naive.

We live in a world of unprecedented opulence, of a kind that would have been hard even to
imagine a century or two ago. There have also been remarkable changes beyond the economic
sphere. The twentieth century has established democratic and participatory governance as the
preeminent model of political organization. Concepts of human rights and political liberty are
now very much a part of the prevailing rhetoric. yet we also live in a world with remarkable
deprivation, destitution and oppression. There are many new problems as well as old ones,
including persistence of poverty and unfulfilled elementary needs, occurrence of famines and
widespread hunger, violation of elementary political freedoms as well as of basic liberties,
extensive neglect of the interests and agency of women, and worsening threats to our
environment and to the sustainability of our economic and social lives. Many of these
deprivations can be observed, in one form or another, in rich countries as well as poor ones.
Overcoming these problems is a central part of the exercise of development. We have to
recognize, it is argued here, the role of freedoms of different kinds in countering these afflictions.
Development can be seen, it is argued here, as a process of expanding the real freedoms that
people enjoy.

Growth of GNP or of individual incomes can, of course, be very important as means to

expanding the freedoms enjoyed by the members of the society. But freedoms depend also on
other determinants, such as social and economic arrangements (for example, facilities for
education and health care) as well as political and civil rights (for example, the liberty to
participate in public discussion and scrutiny). Similarly, industrialization or technological
progress or social modernization can substantially contribute to expanding human freedom, but
freedom depends on other influences as well. If freedom is what development advances, then
there is a major argument for concentrating on that overarching objective, rather than on some
particular means, or some specially chosen list of instruments. Viewing development in terms of
expanding substantive freedoms directs attention to the ends that make development important,
rather than merely to some of the means that, inter alia, play a prominent part in the process.

Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedam: poverty as well as tyranny,
poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities
as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states. Despite unprecedented increases in
overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers-perhaps
even the majority of people. Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to
economic poverty, which robs people of the freedom to satisfy hunger, or to achieve sufficient
nutrition, or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses, or the opportunity to be adequately clothed
or sheltered, or to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities.

the violation of freedom results directly from a denial of political and civil liberties by
authoritarian regimes and from imposed restrictions on the freedom to participate in the social,
political and economic life of the community.