Jean-Luc Dubois

Institute of Research for Development | IRD · Society and Globalisation - IRU 236 Resiliences

The Abidjan School is a school of thought that developed in the 1980s and 1990s in the Côte d'Ivoire inspired by the work of Louis-Joseph Lebret and Amartya Sen. It follows the empirical approach initiated by Lebret, aimed at better understanding people’s living conditions in order to ethically influence public policies. The Abidjan School has aime...

Pelenc and Dubois offer a much needed discussion on how to integrate an ecological dimension within the capability approach for embedding human development in a ‘strong’ conception of sustainability. The chapter also aims to bring strong sustainability, along with its core notion of critical natural capital (and ecosystem services), into line with...

Les changements environnementaux et économiques globaux et les risques sociaux correspondants, font que le contexte international se trouve marqué par un net accroissement des incertitudes. Les raisons en sont multiples : elles sont d’origine écologiques (changements d’ordre climatique avec plus d’aléas extrêmes), techniques (à travers la révolutio...

Extending ethical references within the capability approach. The Fair Trade experience Few studies have made the link between the practice of solidarity-based initiatives as Fair Trade and the fundamentals of the capability approach. While the latter would seem to provide the analytical framework needed by the solidarity economy to assert theoretic...

The 2012 election of a new left-wing government in France, under the leadership of President François Hollande, the former leader of the French Socialist Party, brought back to centre-stage the global issue of the ‘solidarity economy’ as a way of overcoming the social consequences of the economic crisis that began in 2008 and turned into a budgetar...

The capability approach has developed significantly since Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. It is now recognised as being highly beneficial in the analysis of poverty and inequality, but also in the redefinition of policies aimed at improving the well-being of individuals. The approach has been applied within numerous se...

The purpose of this paper is to address three major shortcomings of Sen’s capability approach with regard to sustainability: (i) First, the weakness of the ecological dimension of the capability framework. This can be overcome by devising a place where it is possible to relate the intrinsic and instrumental values of Nature; (ii) Second, the issue...

Côte d'Ivoire has suffered from successive crises. We study here the conceptual foundations of the post-crisis reconstruction from the concept of resilience, the values to be analyzed in the post-crisis reconstruction and the measurement of resilience./ La Côte d'Ivoire a subi des crises successives. On étudie ici les fondements conceptuels de la...

Socially Sustainable Development : from Omission to Emergence Sustainable development leads to a marginalization of its social dimension. This dimension has acknowledged a deep analytical renewal these recent years. The interactive dynamics of poverty and inequality are nowadays addressed together. The social dimension has been incorporated into th...

Research Highlights ► Sustainability economics is an attempt to unite the criteria of efficiency with social justice in an environmental context. ► This article primarily focuses on the major role that freedom brings as a normative basis for well-being. ► This article sheds new light on the human-environment relationship through the study of condit...

Sen's Capability Approach has radically re-oriented the vision of development, from the obsession of an aggregate, ill-defined level of wealth towards a rigorously defined notion of freedom that builds on the ideals of social justice and human dignity. His recent book on the Idea of Justice (2009) opens new insight on how to integrate environmental...

To avoid a worsening of the current economic crisis, and to prevent future crises related to ecological constraints and social imbalances, there is a need to change the decision-making processes and related power structures, in order to envisage a new style of development. Indeed, three constituents of such a style are already in place. Firstly, th...

Our paper builds on this issue of decentralized cooperation in the field of water management. Cooperation between decentralized entities in order to ensure the access to safe drinking water for all now constitutes in many places a preferred water governance option. Therefore, in the first part, we will provide an overview of the current difficultie...

Fragile States is a way of naming this particular category of states that have weak performance, insufficient service delivery, weak administrative and government power, and lack of legal rules. Little consideration is usually made to the fact that their own societies may also be fragile and easily jeopardised by inappropriate economic measures or...

Amartya Sen looks at the people's well-being in terms of functioning and freedom, and not through the quantity of goods or services consumed. The capability approach that he developed deals with what the people are able to achieve through the use of these commodities. Concerning disability, he wrote: "We must take note that a disabled person may no...

Résumé La pauvreté apparaît avant tout comme un phénomène économique. Or, l’économie a beaucoup évolué dans la manière d’appréhender la pauvreté, notamment à partir des apports d’Amartya Sen. Sous forme d’entretien, Jean-Luc Dubois nous présente de façon très précise et claire les principales traces et conséquences de cette évolution.

La recherche de style est devenue omniprésente dans un monde qui ne cesse d'inventer et a besoin d'identité et de reconnaissance sur cette base. Doit-on pour autant associer la notion de style à celle de développement ? Le style retrace, par définition, une manière d'agir et d'être particulière. Or cette dernière est déjà fortement présente au sein...

Amartya Sen looks at the people's well-being in terms of functioning and freedom, and not through the quantity of goods or services consumed. The capability approach that he developed deals with what the people are able to achieve through the use of these commodities. Concerning disability, he wrote: "We must take note that a disabled person may no...

Resumé Un prix Nobel d’économie qui réfléchit à l’articulation entre développement et justice sociale. L’Indien Amartya Sen a ouvert de nouvelles perspectives : notion de capabilité, indice de développement humain…

Disponible en ligne sur le site du Ceras : http://www.ceras-projet.com/index.php?id=3279

Protecting the people, households and social groups, from the external shocks which may decrease their level and standards of living, and even make them fall into poverty, is a new responsibility - for the present as well as for the future generations. It raises the issues of vulnerability. "Vulnerability" is the probability of having his/her own s...

This paper tries to extend Sen's capability approach by introducing the issues of personal responsibility and collective capability, in addition to those of individual capability and collective responsibility. In addressing the issue of the subject's responsibility, we turn to the phenomenological tradition. This approach uses the concept of the pe...

Purpose Conflicts, especially when they turn into civil war or genocide, have irreversible consequences for people. The impact is not only economic as shown by several quantitative studies, but also social and ethical since it deeply affects the mind and behaviour of both current and future generations. The main issue is, therefore, to avoid the er...

International reports reveal that economic inequalities are increasing in the world. When these inequalities result from injustice, they produce frustration and tension that may degenerate into social conflicts and jeopardise the social fabric for generations to come. To avoid such negative consequences, promoting socially sustainable development b...

As a result of the various conflicts over the last three decades in Afghanistan, a large number of persons with disabilities (PwDs) are currently living in Kabul and in the various provinces. The Afghan Ministry of Martyrs and Disabled has the mandate to develop a programme to find sustainable solutions to re-integrate these people within daily lif...

Sustainable development allows the current generation to satisfy its needs without compromising the capacity of future generations to satisfy theirs. This implies that future generations should have in hand at least as many resources, in terms of capital or various potentialities, than the current generation. The social dimension of sustainable dev...

RESUME Le fait même de pouvoir poser la question sur la durabilité sociale du développement en termes de transmission des capacités est nouveau. La persistance de la pauvreté et de la vulnérabilité est sans doute un meilleur témoignage sur l'importance des capacités dans le devenir économique et social des pays en développement. En se basant sur la...

Dans un monde marqué par l’augmentation rapide de la population, par des facilités de communication plus grandes, des innovations technologiques régulières, et une intégration de plus en plus forte des marchés, toutes les conditions semblent réunies pour que la croissance économique engendre une amélioration des conditions de vie généralisée à l’en...

Poverty reduction is one of the major objectives of the current public policies. Monitoring poverty is twofold : (i) a static component aims at identifying and characterising the various forms of poverty, and (ii) a dynamic component aims, in a comprehensive way, at understanding their evolutions. The multidimensional aspect of poverty, and substit...

Avertissement: ce texte est en cours de révision pour les Cahiers du GRATICE Résumé Le développement humain permet aux individus de mieux vivre en accroissant leurs potentialités et leurs libertés. Ses différentes dimensions économique, sociale, culturelle, politique, éthique sont concernées. Avec le développement durable, se pose la question de la...

Les quinze dernières années ont été, pour les pays d’Afrique sub-saharienne, une période marquée par d’importants bouleversements d’origine économique et financière qui ont entraîné une régression quasi systématique du niveau de vie, sinon des conditions de vie des populations. Même si la croissance s’est poursuivie dans la plupart des pays, elle n...

La notion d'observatoire ne saurait être fixée. Son évolution reflète l'évolution des problèmes disciplinaires et des méthodologies adoptées pour les résoudre au cours des quatres dernières décennies. Toutefois, l'adoption d'un nouvel outil n'implique pas toujours l'élimination des instruments existants. Cette double évolution explique la relativit...

Le PIB réel par habitant des Comores baisse depuis 1985. Il est aujourd'hui de 16% moins élevé qu'il y a 10 ans, au moment de l'indépendance. Dissimulée ou voyante, la pauvreté touche inégalement les diverses îles et leurs catégories de population et continue de s'accroître. Elle explique pour partie les difficultés politiques actuelles de l'archip...

oui

Initiated in 1988 for a four-year period, the 'Social Dimensions of Adjustment' programme was aimed at helping sub-Saharan countries in integrating social concerns in the design of their macroeconomic policies. A conceptual framework was designed based on the relationship between the macro, meso and microeconomic decision levels at which the social...

Many countries are implementing poverty reduction policies as part of their economic strategies. Policy-makers need information on households to characterise their standards of living, identify poverty groups and understand their behaviour. Several households survey systems available today could provide this information. Unfortunately, a detailed r...

De nombreux pays font de la lutte contre la pauvreté l'axe prioritaire de leur politique économique. Les décideurs qui la mettent en oeuvre ont besoin d'informations sur les ménages afin de connaître les situations de pauvreté, d'identifier les groupes pauvres et de comprendre leurs comportements. Il existe actuellement plusieurs systèmes d'enquête...

Initié en 1988 et pour 4 ans, le programme Dimensions sociales de l'ajustement avait pour objectif d'aider les pays d'Afrique subsaharienne à prendre en compte l'impact social dans la formulation de leurs politiques macro-économiques. Pour ce faire, un cadre théorique a été élaboré sur la relation entre les niveaux de décision macro-économique et c...