The Capability Approach

Review of the hardback: 'Amartya Sen's notion of capabilities is a rich source of new ideas and philosophical debates about such diverse and wide ranging issues as development, poverty, inequality, human rights, gender, identity and democracy. Here is a collection of well-researched and cogently written essays discussing these many aspects and taking the debates further. It will provide a quarry of ideas for policy makers, researchers, teachers and students of these many issues.' Lord Meghnad Desai, Emeritus Professor of Economics and former director of the Centre for Global Governance, London School of Economics
Review of the hardback: 'These essays on Amartya Sen's capability approach to thinking about human well-being, and so about poverty and development, raise fundamental questions. Can a capabilities approach yield coherent and convincing concepts of well-being and of poverty, or ways of measuring them? What, if anything, does it do better than income- or resource-based approaches? Or is a demand that it 'do better' in the terms of its rivals simply evidence of failure to think through the implications of taking capabilities, and thereby human agency and diversity, seriously? If so, how should the success of work based on capabilities be judged? Why is there so much disagreement over the supposed individualism of the capabilities approach? Has the approach led to significant practical initiatives? The essays in this ample collection offer a rich and often detailed reflection on these and other fundamental questions, and some sharp analyses of central questions about capabilities.' Baroness Onora O'Neill, Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge