Commodities and Capabilities
Abstract
Commodities and Capabilities presents a set of inter-related theses concerning the foundations of welfare economics, and in particular about the assessment of personal well-being and advantage. The argument presented focuses on the capability to function, i.e. what a person can do or can be, questioning in the process the more standard emphasis on opulence or on utility. In fact, a person's motivation behind choice is treated here as a parametric variable which may or may not coincide with the pursuit of self-interest. Given the large number of practical problems arising from the roles and limitations of different concepts of interest and the judgement of advantage and well-being, this scholarly investigation is both of theoretical interest and practical import.
... According to Sen's (1985) capability approach, individuals have the agency to choose what to be and do to fulfill their capabilities as well as how to turn these capabilities into meaningful functionings. Social, political, and physical environments are regarded as important conversion factors for the capabilities in this framework (Robeyns, 2005), with inequalities arising primarily in access to and utilization of these conversion factors. ...
... Amartya Sen's (1985) capability approach has been widely used in a variety of studies across multiple disciplines. Robeyns (2005), p. 94) defines the capability approach as "a broad normative framework for the evaluation and assessment of individual wellbeing and social arrangements, the design of policies, and proposals about societal change." ...
Older adults all around the world encountered numerous challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of these challenges were pertinent to biological factors, like the risk of infection, while others resulted from social factors, like ageism and government regulations. Employing a capability approach, this study examined how age-based pandemic regulations that were imposed in Turkey affected the freedom and social environment of older adults. We used Bachhi’s What is the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) approach to analyze the memorandums issued by the central government between March 11, 2020, and June 30, 2021. Our analysis revealed that the problem is represented in these memorandums as older people’s increased vulnerability to health risks, which resulted in violations of their mobility and health capabilities, as well as (mis)recognition of diversity within the older population. These findings provide vital insight into how age-based pandemic regulations define the problem based exclusively on chronological age, thereby creating circumstances that compromise older people’s capabilities beyond simply maintaining health. Thus, we recommend that policymakers pay closer attention to both the intended and unintended consequences of any proposed regulations, and account for individuals’ capabilities rather than merely their functionings.
... While some studies in the FWB domain focus on specific capabilities, such as financial capability, this study adopts a broader perspective of capability, in line with Sen's (1985) definition of capability as encompassing an individual's actual and potential activities and states of being (Kuklys, 2005). Storchi and Johnson (2016) proposed that people's well-being should be evaluated based on what they are able to be and do in life rather than utility and commodities. ...
... Storchi and Johnson (2016) proposed that people's well-being should be evaluated based on what they are able to be and do in life rather than utility and commodities. Sen and Brown (1980) and Sen (1985) argued that income and commodities are inadequate for inter-personal comparisons, where commodities are only meant to an end and because people are different, they will need different objects to reach similar states of well-being. Sen proposes that inter-personal comparisons of wellbeing look at what people have reason to value in terms of 'beings' and 'doings' and what they are able to be and do in life. ...
The low-income group is viewed as a vulnerable segment of the society, with many difficulties in various aspects of life, including finances. While the government is concerned with the financial well-being (FWB) of its citizens, particularly those in low-income groups, little is known about the FWB of women in this group in Malaysia. The objectives of this study are two-fold. First, we investigate the effect of low-income women’s financial literacy (FL) on their FWB. Second, we examine the moderating effect of capability on the relationship between low-income women’s FL and FWB. A survey of 320 low-income women in Malaysia was conducted. The results showed that FL, in terms of financial behavior, had a significant positive effect on the FWB of low-income women. FL in terms of financial attitude and financial knowledge, on the other hand, had significant negative effects on the FWB of low-income women. However, capability did not moderate the relationship between any of the FL components and FWB. The results provide insights for relevant parties to develop strategies to improve the FWB of low-income women in Malaysia.
... The latter involves issues of access to and distribution of resources in society and is affected by the heterogeneity of people and their living conditions. Sen (1987) expands this concept by highlighting that welfare is manifested in the ability to act in society, encompassing aspects such as income, education, health, security and fundamental rights. ...
The debate on economic development and welfare highlights that, in the traditional economy, quality of life is linked to the space of utilities and the increase in the monetary wealth of nations. However, from a broader perspective, development should be assessed based on its contributions to individual freedoms and the expansion of capabilities, promoting the improvement of quality of life. In this sense, the income inequality present globally aggravates social challenges. Thus, the problem of the work focuses on analyzing the impacts on the welfare of the Brazilian population between the years 2000 and 2020, in the face of economic shocks and government policies. The research uses statistical data, descriptive and econometric analyses to construct a Welfare Index, created through the Principal Components method. This index indicated 2000 as the worst year in terms of quality of life and 2014 as the best. Subsequently, the relationship of the index with the money supply (M1) and the Selic rate was evaluated through a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model. The analyses of Impulse-Response Functions and variance decomposition indicated that the welfare index itself is the main determinant of quality of life in the period studied, that is, the better the quality of life, the better the quality of life will be in the following period. The results highlight the relevance of policies that expand individual freedoms and capabilities to promote social welfare.
... For example, Zaidi and Burchardt (2005) and Morciano et al. (2015) have used the living standards or material deprivation approach for disabled and non-disabled individuals. In Sen's (1985) study, it was emphasized that not only disabled individuals but also groups such as the unemployed, the poor, and women are among the disadvantaged groups. This research investigated the impact of social disadvantage on various aspects and populations regarding living standards. ...
This study aims to investigate the impact of unemployment on deprivation among individuals in Turkey and the additional costs unemployed individuals must bear to compensate for deprivation. The analyses in this study were conducted using panel data from the 2018-2021 Income and Living Conditions Survey of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT) and employed a fixed effects model. First, the deprivation index, an unobserved variable in the dataset, was estimated using the latent variable estimation method. The analysis revealed that unemployed individuals are more likely to experience material deprivation compared to employed individuals. According to the analysis, the estimated additional cost that unemployed individuals need to bear to achieve the living standards of employed individuals is 3560 TL per month. Moreover, the results indicate that age, marital status, education level, household type, and homeownership are other variables that significantly affect the deprivation index.
... Sen A[5] defines it as the deprivation of basic capacities to function in society, World Bank 2004, saying that Poverty is the lack of what a society considers to be the basic minimum to have wellbeing, Pucutay 2002 points out that the Poverty is a situation where people do not have the necessary means to develop and reflect the lifestyle of a social group. ...
... First, do people only attach instrumental value to freedom, or do they also attach intrinsic value to it? The literature on FoC -as pioneered by Amartya Sen (1985Sen ( , 1988 and developed by many others -postulated that additional alternatives can be valuable even if they do not lead to the choice of a better alternative. 1 Why would individuals value freedom beyond its (purely) instrumental benefits? ...
This paper investigates how people evaluate different sets of opportunities in terms of welfare and freedom of choice. To do this, we run a new survey-based study with 4,902 participants across 10 different countries, in which subjects face a series of theoretically-relevant binary comparisons of opportunity sets. Our analysis proceeds in two stages. We first use a naive Bayesian method to classify subjects according to the theoretical rules they implicitly employ to compare sets in terms of freedom and welfare. Then, we investigate whether subjects value freedom of choice even if more freedom does not lead to the choice of a better alternative (intrinsic value of freedom of choice). Our main result is that an overwhelming majority of subjects reveal attaching intrinsic value to freedom. We also find that a large majority of subjects use size-based rules to rank sets in terms of freedom, while there is considerable heterogeneity in the theoretical rules they employ to rank sets in terms of welfare. These results are strikingly robust across countries. All this suggests that it is important to offer choice to individuals in the design of organizations and public policies, even if this does not substantially change their choice behavior. Abstract This paper investigates how people evaluate different sets of opportunities in terms of welfare and freedom of choice. To do this, we run a new survey-based study with 4,902 participants across 10 different countries, in which subjects face a series of theoretically-relevant binary comparisons of opportunity sets. Our analysis proceeds in two stages. We first use a naive Bayesian method to classify subjects according to the theoretical rules they implicitly employ to compare sets in terms of freedom and welfare. Then, we investigate whether subjects value freedom of choice even if more freedom does not lead to the choice of a better alternative (in-trinsic value of freedom of choice). Our main result is that an overwhelming majority of subjects reveal attaching intrinsic value to freedom. We also find that a large majority of subjects use size-based rules to rank sets in terms of freedom, while there is considerable heterogeneity in the theoretical rules they employ to rank sets in terms of welfare. These results are strikingly robust across countries. All this suggests that it is important to offer choice to individuals in the design of organizations and public policies, even if this does not substantially change their choice behavior.
... Well-being and its dependence of the bundle of attributes can be measured in several ways (Adler & Fleurbaey, 2016;Adler & Decancq, 2022), including: reports of life satisfaction or experience of emotions (Layard & De Neve, 2023); attainment of a list of objective goods or "capabilities" (e.g., being healthy, having meaningful social relations) (Sen, 1999;Nussbaum, 2011); adjusting individual income by the value of nonmarket attributes based on the individual's preferences for those attributes (Fleurbaey et al., 2013); and employing utility functions that represent individuals' risk preferences regarding alternative probability distributions of attributes over a lifetime (von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function) (Adler, 2019). In this article, I measure well-being through a von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function. ...
This article discusses the difference between benefit–cost analysis (BCA) and social welfare analysis in the evaluation of pandemic preparedness policies. Two social welfare approaches are considered: utilitarianism and prioritarianism. BCA sums the individuals’ monetary equivalents of the pandemic impacts. Social welfare analysis aggregates individuals’ well-being impacts. The aggregation rule identifies the normative judgments about what is fair. This article shows that the two methods yield very different estimates of the value of avoiding a future pandemic similar to the COVID-19 one. Compared to BCA, considerations about the distribution of the costs of the hypothetical intervention play a major role in the estimate of both utilitarian and prioritarian pandemic burdens: The more progressive the distribution of the costs is, the larger the net benefits of preventing the pandemic. In contrast, the BCA pandemic burden is indifferent to the distribution of the intervention costs. In addition, BCA tends to underestimate the burden suffered by low-income countries compared to social welfare analysis.
... Premièrement, la théorie des biens publics qui souligne que la sécurité alimentaire nécessite des investissements et des politiques pour assurer une distribution équitable (Samuelson, 1939). Deuxièmement, la théorie de l'économie du développement qui esquisse la sécurité alimentaire par l'analyse des inégalités d'accès aux aliments et les politiques visant à réduire la pauvreté (Sen, 1985). Troisièmement, la théorie des incitations qui souligne la nécessité des subventions agricoles ou les politiques tarifaires, affectant la production et l'accès aux aliments (Laffont & Tirole, 1993). ...
Résumé
Cet article investigue l'effet de la Crise Russo‐Ukrainienne (CRU) sur la sécurité alimentaire observée d'un échantillon de 42 pays africains. Nous spécifions et estimons un modèle en données de panel par la Méthode des Moments Généralisés en Système (MMG‐S) et le Lewbel Doubles Moindres Carrés (LDMC) sur la période 2000‐2022. Nos résultats montrent que la CRU réduit significativement la sécurité alimentaire en Afrique. La robustesse des résultats est avérée par la prise en compte des variables de gouvernance et des canaux de transmission. Nous suggérons un arrangement institutionnel durable pour préserver la sécurité alimentaire.
... Esse enfoque da pobreza deriva da Abordagem das Capacitações de Amartya Sen (2000), que amplia, para fins de avaliações normativas, o espaço informacional das demais perspectivas éticas da renda ou recursos que os indivíduos dispõem para os funcionamentos e capacitações. Os funcionamentos são as realizações de um indivíduo, isto é, o que ele pode fazer e ser em sua vida, ou ainda, as várias coisas que ele considera valioso fazer ou ser (SEN, 1985a(SEN, , 1996(SEN, , 2001. Estão diretamente relacionados com as condições de vida de um indivíduo, pois refletem vários aspectos dos estados de existência, que incluem atividades mais elementares, assim como atividades mais complexas e desenvolvidas (SEN, 1985b). ...
O conceito de governança, sobretudo na administração pública, emergiu como uma resposta ao desafio de interações governamentais e sociais cada vez mais complexas. Trata-se de uma alteração no sentido do governo, referente aos novos processos, novos métodos, novas condições para exercer o poder, novas formas de organização estatal. Por conseguinte, na Era da governança são alteradas as práticas da administração pública e, por sua vez, as políticas públicas (RHODES, 1996, 2012). Dessa maneira, o desenho e as intervenções de políticas para o enfrentamento dos problemas públicos, sobretudo os perversos, passam a envolver a interação de diversos atores políticos, o engajamento de diferentes stakeholders, a participação e o controle social, o compartilhamento da responsabilidade e da produção com outros setores da economia e o empoderamento de comunidades. Especificamente em relação ao problema perverso da pobreza, enquanto um fenômeno complexo e multidimensional, atualmente existe um amplo reconhecimento de que a pobreza envolve privações simultâneas em várias áreas, como saúde, educação, trabalho, habitação, renda, acesso a serviços públicos, cultura e política ” (ALKIRE, 2018, p. 118; PROGRAMA DAS NAÇÕES UNIDAS PARA O DESENVOLVIMENTO, 2019, SEN, 2000), e, portanto, seu enfrentamento requer soluções integradas e multissetoriais por parte do setor público e aprimoramento das ações públicas através de novos arranjos de governança, concernentes com as novas configurações apontadas na literatura de governança. Dada a relevância do problema da pobreza e, notadamente, por se tratar de um wicked problem e por ser um fenômeno complexo e multidimensional, as estratégias para o seu enfrentamento podem refletir novas perspectivas de condução das políticas públicas condizentes com as tendências apontadas na literatura da governança. O objetivo do presente artigo é demonstrar as estratégias empregadas pelo governo para a resolução do problema perverso específico da pobreza. Para tanto, destaca-se uma experiência do Estado do Paraná: o Programa Nossa Gente Paraná.
... Based on the capabilities approach by Sen (1979Sen ( , 1985, many scholars have argued that poverty is multidimensional and includes dimensions of basic needs: education, health, and other indicators of standard of living (eg De Janvry & Sadoulet, 2000;Fergusson et al., 2001). Current studies also take into account intangible factors such as the satisfaction of being employed, empowerment, community ties, legal and human rights, and political freedoms (World Bank, 2000). ...
Poverty is a rural phenomenon due to the dominance of subsistence farming in rural communities. This study compares the estimates of unidimensional and multidimensional methodologies to analyse the factors that influence the poverty levels of cocoa farming households predominantly in rural Ghana. A census was conducted in the Chorichori community in Ghana using a structured questionnaire to gather information from 386 cocoa farming households. The multidimensional poverty index and expenditure-based poverty measures were used to estimate a bivariate probit regression to find the determinants of cocoa farming households’ poverty. The study’s outcome indicates that poverty among the cocoa farmers is jointly determined, unidimensionally and multidimensionally, by the access to healthcare, household child deaths, household’s school-age child not in school, access to farm inputs, and the age of the household head. Whereas the education level of the household head, frequency of ill-health, use of external labour, migration status, and relationship to the household head were significant in determining multidimensional poverty, the number of household members, cooperative union membership, access to farm water, occupational diversity, household access to financial credit, and the marital status of the household head significantly determined unidimensional poverty among the cocoa farmers. Even though both poverty measures produced fairly different results, the study’s findings showed the mutual and exclusive importance of the unidimensional and multidimensional poverty approaches in determining poverty and formulating good developmental policies for cocoa farmers. Therefore, selecting an approach should be based on prevailing circumstances, such as differences across locations and within households or entities.
... Another strand of literature elucidates differences in ES distribution from the perspective of the capabilities approach, which was first introduced and developed by Sen (1985) and Nussbaum (2001). Unlike the above described focus on accessibility, the capabilities approach embeds ES in wider processes of human flourishing and empowerment, putting emphasis on the individuals' varying opportunities to be and do what they deem important for living a good life and flourish (Polishchuk & Rauschmayer, 2012;Leach et al., 1999). ...
Ecosystem services justice is an emergent research field. Over the past decade, research on ecosystem services has increasingly developed a justice perspective and incorporated it into its conceptual and empirical frameworks. This perspective aims at providing a review of the emergent strands of research addressing ecosystem services justice, and at creating an outlook on future research needs and frontiers. The review departs from central critiques to the ecosystem service approach, which have been foundational for the research field of ecosystem services justice. To be precise, we address three different research strands on which justice issues arise. First, ecosystem services production, considering the (increasing) commodification of ecosystem services, the concentration of ecosystem services production assets and the role of trade-offs in production capacities. Second, the distribution of ecosystem services benefits under the aspects of unequal vulnerabilities, the consideration of accessibility and individual's capabilities to obtain ecosystem services. Third, the recognition of ecosystem services pluralisms, including socially differentiated forms of wellbeing, plural values and knowledge concerning ecosystem services. While ES justice has strongly advanced from a scientific perspective, we are still lacking a stronger reflection of these advances in practice. Future research, we argue, needs to develop holistic procedural frameworks for integrating the complexity of ecosystem services justice, addressing the ecosystem services production under consideration of historic inequalities, the distribution of ecosystem services benefits with respect to people's diverse needs, vulnerabilities, and capabilities, as well as diverse wellbeing-, value-, and knowledge-systems. The social-ecological understanding of ecosystem services co-production, which recognizes the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between humans and ecosystems, is identified as a crucial framing for this endeavor.
Eastern European communism lived its own harmony: miserable, frozen, transparent but egalitarian. Eastern capitalism has failed to absolve everybody of the frugality of life. A boiling social volcano tends to undermine its values, known as the foundations of sustainable economic development. Without the necessary surplus of wealth, redistribution seems to be the courted path towards a new social order. The Easterners are deluded by the illusion that the equally redistributed inequalities are as bearable as absolute equality in poverty. Based on a new social contract, they put their fate in the arms of a new state. Electoral reasons make it a captive state, which ensures the loyalty of the electorate by displaying its redistributive impulses. The chapter reveals how such a state becomes the manager of a simulacrum of democracy, the feeder of a large-scale clientele system, opposed to sustainable development.
We examine the impact of the non-contributory social pension program (Pension 65) in Peru, highlighting its varying effects on the three main ethnic groups: Mestizo, Quechua, and Aymara. Notably, Aymara beneficiaries have experienced greater improvements in health outcomes compared to other Peruvians. To account for these ethnic differences when evaluating policy programs, it is essential to use a welfare criterion that reflects preference heterogeneity. We propose a natural criterion: a program benefits a recipient if it lifts them to a higher indifference curve. We contrast this approach with an alternative that uses self-reported subjective well-being to evaluate a policy program. Through a panel life satisfaction regression, we find evidence of preference heterogeneity between the Aymara and other ethnic groups, consistent with the observed differences. Lastly, we explore why, contrary to simple intuition, not all beneficiaries reach a higher indifference curve.
Women’s preferences for time allocation reveal how they would like to prioritise market work, family life, and other competing activities. Whilst preferences may not always directly translate to behaviour, they are an important determinant of intention to act.
We present the first study to apply a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to investigate time allocation preferences among women diagnosed with breast cancer and women without a cancer diagnosis.
Time attributes were paid work, household work, caregiving, passive leisure and physical leisure. An income attribute was included to estimate the monetary value of time. The study took place in the UK and the DCE was completed by 191 women diagnosed with breast cancer and 347 women without a cancer diagnosis. Responses were analysed using a mixed logit model.
Women diagnosed with breast cancer have stronger positive preferences for daily activities compared to women without a cancer diagnosis. They require less compensation (not significant) for an additional hour of paid work (£5.58), household work (£7.92), and caregiving (£8.53). They are willing to pay more for an additional hour of passive leisure (£1.70, not significant) and physical leisure (£13.66, significant).
The heterogeneous preferences for time allocation among women have policy implications and are significant for welfare analysis.
This study examines multidimensional deprivation among social groups in urban India by developing a multidimensional deprivation index that encompasses dimensions of housing, social, economic, and basic amenities. The study reveals that, across all social categories, Bihar falls into the category of very high urban deprivation, whereas Goa falls into the category of least urban deprivation. Dimension-wise analysis reveals that the scheduled castes (SCs) are highly deprived in the housing and economic/material dimensions, while the scheduled tribes (STs) in the social dimension, and the other backward classes (OBCs) in the basic amenities dimension. The study further highlights that the SCs are mostly deprived in Odisha, STs in Bihar, OBCs in Jharkhand, and others in Tripura. According to the study, the central and eastern regions of India are comparatively more deprived than the southern and western regions. Therefore, the findings highlight the need for targeted interventions across the social groups in specific dimensions where they lag far behind, to address the persistent disparities at the subnational level in urban India.
The neoliberal reality of the past 40 years has caused changes in the workplace restricting people’s freedom and compromising their well-being, often not allowing them to develop our human abilities in the way they chose to. This paper focuses on a neglected aspect of neoliberalism that contributes to this problem: the orientation of the core values of neoliberalism. My contention is that the value system of neoliberalism is structured on what can be characterized as ‘male’ values and this leads to a fragmentation of the labour experience altering the lived experience of work for the vast majority of people. I argue that to reverse this state of affairs a fundamental shift in our values is required that goes beyond just implementing policies and changing wage relations and, also, that important insights for this shift can be found in the capabilities approach and the ethics of care.
Background
In recent years, sustainable employability, rooted in the capability approach, has received substantial attention due to its associations with work and health-related outcomes. While previous studies have indicated that being able and enabled to achieve important work values (i.e., work capabilities) is positively associated with desirable work outcomes, most of these studies have primarily employed a cross-sectional design to explore these associations. This study aimed to examine the long-term relationships between work capabilities and work and wellbeing-related outcomes, including work ability, work engagement, task and creative performance, organizational citizenship behavior, organizational commitment, job and life satisfaction, turnover intention, and burnout symptoms.
Methods
Data were collected from 251 randomly selected Dutch employees through a two-wave survey conducted in 2021 and 2023 via the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences panel. Multiple linear regression analyses were performed to assess these associations while controlling for potential covariates.
Results
The results revealed that participants valued a diverse range of work capabilities but encountered challenges in realizing these valued capabilities. The capability set positively predicted desirable outcomes and was associated with reduced burnout over a two-year period.
Conclusions
Supporting and enabling employees to realize their capabilities is essential for improving favorable work outcomes and diminishing burnout in today’s volatile work environment. These findings further emphasize the importance of organizations improving conversion factors to bridge the gap between valued capabilities and their actualization.
In this research, we analyze the factors that contribute to happiness and unhappiness in Thailand. We use linear and diminishing relationships with Gross Province Product per capita to determine these factors. To select model variables, we use Lasso regression, and Ordinary Least Square tests the Easterlin Paradox and hedonic treadmill. We base our study on data collected from 77 provinces in Thailand in the year 2020. Our findings confirm the Easterlin Paradox and indicate that happiness and unhappiness are influenced by an inherent force. Furthermore, our results reveal that the number of criminal suspects has a significant impact on happiness and reduces the risk of unhappiness.
Working toward social justice is an urgent, cross-disciplinary endeavor requiring a range of invested actors. Research has demonstrated, however, that motivating people to work toward social justice is quite complicated, and there often exists a gap between possessing social justice values and engaging in social justice action. As a result, many scholars have called for increased research to better understand individual engagement in social justice action. Thus, the aim of this scoping review was to investigate the factors and processes that contribute to social justice action and how they have been studied in the empirical literature. Selection criteria limited articles to empirical studies on the influences, factors, or processes contributing to or interfering with social justice action. The search strategy yielded 70 articles from 2000–2023 to be included in the study. Findings indicated that studies largely employed survey designs, with some qualitative work. Social justice action was inconsistently defined and measured between studies, and, at times, there was conflation between the value specificity of social justice action and the value unspecified way it was measured. Studies found many factors influential in the development of social justice action, but none appeared both necessary and sufficient for engagement to occur. Findings suggested that the development of social justice action is likely the result of an interactive process between multiple intrapersonal and environmental factors. Further qualitative and longitudinal research can help parse out the action development process and explore personal and environmental barriers to engagement. Validation and standardization of measures is also recommended.
Curricular structures and pedagogical practices are at the center of any and all fields of study that are in the process of becoming a discipline at any or all academic institutions. However, unlike various Western countries where specific trajectories of food education can be located in both K-12 and tertiary educational contexts across a range of topics that directly cater to the broad themes of food environment, food cultures, food literacy, food security, and intercommunity engagements across food educational practices, the teaching–learning practices have not been the focal point of inquiry in academic publications within the Asian context.
Philosophical and political theories about the city usually do not consider how to implement them in the complex legal-administrative reality. The gap between the theory of urban justice and its practical application is evident in the lack of concrete proposals for urban design and management. Despite the growing interest in urban justice in the urban discourse, urban policies often do not reflect these ideals. In this sense, Madrid is an example of the mismatch between theory, policy discourse and urban planning practice. Efforts to address urban justice have been limited and focused on economic and service aspects. This chapter argues that addressing structural urban inequality from a normative perspective of justice and the capabilities approach requires a collective and ethical commitment on the part of institutions and citizens, forcing far-reaching political and disciplinary changes in the way cities are planned and managed.
Over the past two decades electricity access in Cambodia has increased considerably. The Electricity Authority of Cambodia has announced that the country expanded energy access from 34% in 2010 to 98% by mid-2022, but that 245 villages still lack access to the national distribution network due to their remoteness. For some of these villages, off-grid renewable energy systems have played a significant role in providing electricity access. However, connecting villages to the grid or providing them with off-grid renewable energy is not enough to overcome energy poverty and achieve people’s well-being. In this paper we apply a power-capabilities-energy justice framework to analyse social justice concerning renewable energy and energy poverty in remote communities. Based on primary data collected through interviews and focus group discussions, and using a social network analysis (SNA) we approach capabilities and energy poverty in Cambodia as a relational process and we provide for the first time a through picture of social and power relations in the Cambodian energy sector. Our study finds that communities and vulnerable groups such as female-headed households, located in remote rural areas are suffering distributional energy injustice in that they have access to a limited range of energy services to fulfil basic capabilities, such as being in good health, being educated and socially connected. We also find that distributional energy injustice is closely connected to power relations and relationality aspects of the Cambodian energy sector, as well as a lack of recognition of different vulnerabilities in energy policies.
The prevailing discourse around AI ethics lacks the language and formalism necessary to capture the diverse ethical concerns that emerge when AI systems interact with individuals. Drawing on Sen and Nussbaum’s capability approach, we present a framework formalizing a network of ethical concepts and entitlements necessary for AI systems to confer meaningful benefit or assistance to stakeholders. Such systems enhance stakeholders’ ability to advance their life plans and well-being while upholding their fundamental rights. We characterize two necessary conditions for morally permissible interactions between AI systems and those impacted by their functioning, and two sufficient conditions for realizing the ideal of meaningful benefit. We then contrast this ideal with several salient failure modes, namely, forms of social interactions that constitute unjustified paternalism, coercion, deception, exploitation and domination. The proliferation of incidents involving AI in high-stakes domains underscores the gravity of these issues and the imperative to take an ethics-led approach to AI systems from their inception.
Young adults aged 18–28 represent a pivotal demographic whose experiences of inequality significantly shape their life trajectories in cities. Despite their potential for innovation and social advancement, public agendas often marginalize their needs and aspirations. This paper explores urban inequality among young adults by examining how they define and value different aspects of their daily lives when urban inequality is at play. Drawing on focus group discussions in two socioeconomically segregated urban districts in Bogotá, this paper employs the capability approach to construct a comprehensive list of 15 capability domains that young adults use to define and value their daily experiences. The paper adds to the existing literature a detail a step-by-step process involving the identification, selection, and ranking of relevant capabilities, with young adults actively engaged in value judgements through a deliberative process of public reasoning. Findings reveal that quality-of-life domains for young adults extend beyond traditional youth policy sectors, encompassing political participation, public space and mobility, social norms, and independence. The results not only expand the scope of existing youth agendas but also align with demands expressed during recent social unrest in Colombia and the region, where young adults have played a central and vocal role.
This chapter contrasts the narrow behaviourist-based perspectives of the late years of the twentieth century on competence-based education and training (CBET) and traces the definitions and history of the development from competence to capability and why there is a greater need for capable learners in mid twenty-first century society. The chapter will offer the historical developments together with the philosophical aspects and includes evidence of the practical application in the implementation of these positions and approaches. The Capability Learning Model, the core of the book, is developed and explained.
This chapter contrasts the utility-based conception of individual well-being with the functioning and capability approach to individual well-being. It also discusses some general methodological points concerning the possible role of a social scientist or philosopher in the context of evaluating the well-being of individuals in a society.
This chapter argues that the conception of an individual’s freedom as the freedom to choose any functioning bundle from the set of all the functioning bundles, which are feasible for her, is problematic in a world of interdependence where an individual’s achieved functioning bundle is determined by the individual’s own action as well as by the actions of other individuals.
This chapter discusses the issues of evaluating an individual’s well-being in different situations as well as of interpersonal comparisons of individual well-being, where an individual’s well-being is determined solely by the individual’s achieved functioning bundle. It is shown that, if the evaluator of individual well-being wants to accommodate in the evaluation the differences in the values of individuals, even minimally, then the evaluation cannot satisfy some very weak criteria for interpersonal well-being comparisons. This chapter also discusses the possibility of avoiding this impasse by considering a weaker criterion for interpersonal comparisons of well-being.
This chapter is concerned with the role of individual freedom in the functioning and capability approach to individual well-being. It discusses the problem of evaluating an individual’s freedom, and in that context, it proves a counterpart of the negative results in this chapter. These negative results are extended to the problem of evaluating an individual’s well-being when individual well-being depends on the individual’s achieved functioning bundle and her freedom to choose her functioning bundle. This chapter also discusses the possibility of making interpersonal comparisons of freedom and of well-being based on weaker criteria for making such comparisons while accommodating the individuals’ own evaluations of their freedom and of their well-being.
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This paper explores the social structure of individual autonomy in Europe.
Drawing on the capability approach and human empowerment theory, it
investigates how individuals’ sense of autonomy is structured by individual
means and conversion factors as well as economic, cultural, and institutional
context conditions. Using data from the European Social Survey and the
European Quality of Life Survey, these relationships are analyzed for 107,070
individuals in 18 European countries and four points in time between 2006
and 2016. Multilevel analyses reveal financial security, health, and social
connectedness as the most important drivers of individuals’ sense of auton-
omy. On the macro level, national wealth, civil liberties, and an emancipative
value climate are all found to be positively linked to individuals’ sense of
autonomy, albeit weakly. Considering the value individuals attach to leading
an autonomous life and the beneficial effects autonomy has been shown to
have on people’s well-being, these findings shed first light on the unequal
distribution of autonomy and autonomy resources on the individual and
macro levels. Concluding, the paper highlights the potential for future
research and policy implications.
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