Human Development Report

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce Volume 8, Number 3 (November 2007) of the Journal of Human Development: A Multi-Disciplinary Journal for People-Centered Development.

This special issue of the Journal includes selected papers from the 2006 International Conference of the Human Development and Capability Association held in the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

We would like to offer a free copy to the first 125 members of both HDR Networks (HDR-Net and HDRStats-Net) that email their request including their mailing address to Mamaye Gebretsadik (mamaye.gebretsadik@undp.org). Also, please view the brochure which includes information on how to subscribe to the Journal of Human Development – you may wish to share this with your partners, including national universities.

JHD Lead Editor: Sakiko Fukuda-Parr
JHD Editors: Khadija Haq, Richard Jolly, Henry Richardson, Melanie Walker and Kevin Watkins

Summary of Introduction: Challenges and Debates [1]

The theme of the 2006 Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA) conference held in the University of Groningen/The Netherlands focused on the theme “freedom and justice”. The papers selected for this special issue of the Journal of Human Development – each of which takes up an important issue, or poses a significant challenge, for those who work in the fields of human development and capability – recall some of the vitality of the conference theme.

Liberty and Justice

In her HDCA Conference Presidential address, Nussbaum focused on liberty of conscience, protection of which she thinks is implied by one of her listed capabilities - “being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. In her address, Nussbaum also spoke of conscience as “a precious internal faculty for searching for life’s ethical basis and its ultimate meaning” which is “a delicate and vulnerable thing that needs support from laws and institutions”. Her paper in this Journal issue is motivated by the state of fear at large in many countries, which she thinks is inspired in part by religious diversity. In this context, she argues for a “renewed commitment to a long tradition of equal respect for conscience”. Respecting liberty of conscience equally entails, Nussbaum argues, that “the state may not create a two-tiered system of citizenship by creating a religious orthodoxy that gives rights to others on unequal terms”. Her paper focuses on the value of equal liberty of conscience as it is interpreted in the U.S. constitutional tradition and identifies two contemporary threats to this value. One is a form of “establishmentarianism” which supposes that “the different can live in peace among us”. She finds this view among many Europeans who assert that “the EU is fundamentally Christian” and for this reason “does not treat people as equals”. Even in a benign form this view can, she thinks, “have quite far-reaching effects disadvantageous to minorities”. The second opponent of equal respect is the “anti-religionist” who thinks that “all religion should be disfavoured in the public square”. She finds “anti-religionism” at work in a number of contexts where it can, in various ways, be disadvantageous to religious minorities and is, furthermore, not compatible with equal respect.

Henry Richardson’s paper is also concerned with liberty and constitutes a challenge to the existing capability literature at the conceptual level. It is concerned with the extent to which the “basic liberties” John Rawls lists in his theory of justice – liberties such as freedom of thought, liberty of conscience, the political liberties and freedom of association inter alia - can be modelled within Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s work on capability. He finds that in Sen’s case, because capability is understood in terms of the collection of “beings” and “doings” – or “functionings” - from which a person can choose, individual choice is necessary for freedom understood as capability. But in the case of the basic liberties, Richardson thinks that whether or not we have these – for example, whether or not we succeed in “expressing our views, associating with others” etc. - depends on what others decide to do. It is not just a matter of individual choice. For this reason, Richardson finds Sen’s approach limited in its ability to model the basic liberties. Richardson finds Nussbaum’s capabilities approach more amenable to modelling the basic liberties in part because it distinguishes between internal and combined capabilities – allowing explicitly for the external conditions which are necessary for the exercise of any specific capability. This distinguishes Nussbaum’s approach from Sen’s. Richardson considers one way in which the basic liberties can be derived from items on the capability list. I have already given an example: liberty of conscience is derived from the capability of “being able to form a conception of the good and being able to engage in critical reflection”. For the relevant combined capability to be realised depends, Richardson notes, on whether “suitable external conditions” are realised, and how one interprets those conditions. If they are interpreted as conditions which make exercise of the capability probable, then even in the absence of “effectively secured liberty of conscience” people may be likely to reflect critically on life and so on. Of course, he notes that one might, in response, define “suitable external conditions” in some other way to deal with this problem. Nonetheless, after considering a number of moves Nussbaum makes, Richardson concludes his discussion of her view by suggesting that while he has the “impression that Nussbaum’s interpretation of capabilities offers more hope for directly accounting for the basic liberties than does Sen’s, this potential seems, as yet, untapped”. To this degree, Richardson’s paper poses a significant challenge for those who would argue that the basic liberties can be accounted for by the capability concept.

Freedom, Violence and Well-Being

In their paper, Bina Agarwal and Pradeep Panda focus on freedom from domestic violence which is relatively neglected in both the literature on human development and in Sen’s writings (in spite of his celebrated discussions of intra-household inequalities relating to gender and of violence more generally). Addressing it constitutes a challenge for those working in this area. Domestic violence was, nonetheless, one of a variety of forms of violence against women powerfully raised in relation to capabilities by Nussbaum, who framed her discussion in terms of the effects of violence and the threat of violence on various items on her list of capabilities. Agarwal and Panda instead use Sen’s conceptual vocabulary to show how domestic violence might have distinct, if connected, negative effects on both functioning (e.g. through reduced health and self-confidence) and capability (e.g. via reduced job opportunities), and so on both well-being freedom and achievement; and on agency achievement and freedom (e.g. by inhibiting goal formation as a consequence of reduced self-confidence). They also suggest that domestic violence can undermine all the instrumental freedoms Sen mentions ranging from protective security to political freedoms and transparency guarantees.

Agarwal and Panda go on to investigate the causes of domestic violence using survey data on Thiruvanathapuram in Kerala (2000-2001 and follow-up 2004-5) surveys using both quantitative methods as well as more qualitative methods. Amongst their many important findings are two which are particularly interesting. The first is that women’s property ownership can deter violence in a way that employment might not. Secondly, it is not just the absolute level of functionings or capabilities a woman has that matters – on their view - but also how well she is doing relative to her husband. Perversely, if she is doing better than her husband in terms of educational achievement or employment that might make her more likely to be the victim of domestic abuse. Furthermore, while this perverse relative capabilities effect arises in relation to employment, there is none in relation to relative advantage in property ownership. Agarwal and Panda find that Kerala, which notoriously does well in terms of standard indices of human development, also has quite high levels of incidence of domestic violence. So there is a strong case for including information, or collecting data, on domestic violence which might be included in Human Development Reports. Such information is – as they note - missing from the United Nations Development Programme’s gender-related development measures including the gender empowerment measure (GEM).

Erik Schokkaert in this Journal issue articulates a quite different challenge: one posed by recent work on happiness and life satisfaction – across the social sciences - for the capability approach. Aside from being widely read and discussed at the academic and policy levels, in many instances this literature constitutes an explicit revival of the utilitarian tradition which has been widely criticised at the foundational level in work on both human development and capability. Schokkaert suggests that rather than entirely reject the new happiness literature, research on the capability approach might engage with it more constructively. On the one hand, Sen’s writings on capability do not suggest that happiness is entirely irrelevant – “being happy” and “being satisfied” can be seen as valuable functionings – and furthermore some of the empirical results in the happiness literature can be interpreted in the light of the capability approach.  Schokkaert pursues this more constructive approach by using elements of the happiness literature to articulate a proposal for the use of econometric results about life satisfaction in the multi-dimensional measurement of well-being. In particular, he suggests that econometric equations which explain life satisfaction – understood as a broad proxy measure of overall quality of life – through achievement across a wide range of specific dimensions of well-being can be used to estimate the weight that people give to these dimensions. If certain dimensions have a larger effect than others on people’s life satisfaction, the dimensions which have a larger effect should arguably be given more weight in policy and measurement.

Justice, Democracy and Participation

Sharath Srinivasan’s paper in this Journal issue takes up the issue of democracy in the context of theories of justice. He suggests that Sen’s writings on democracy provide only a partial answer to those who question the usefulness of democracy in filling out the content of an account of justice. Like others Srinivasan relates Sen’s work on capability to work on democracy. He suggests that Sen needs to go beyond the instrumental value he gives to political freedoms in his writings on development as well as beyond the importance he gives to public reasoning for social evaluation. Rather, for Srinivasan, the capability approach itself provides the intellectual basis for articulating a notion of “political capability”, which involves substantive opportunities or freedoms, not merely liberties and rights. An account of equality of political capability which builds on the work of James Bohman – Srinivasan argues - can supplement Sen’s work on justice. In this context he cites Bohman’s notion of “equality of effective social freedom, understood as equal capability for public functioning”. Supplementing his views on justice would go some way towards addressing the worries of those who suggest that under unequal conditions flawed democratic processes may not produce the sorts of evaluative judgements that are needed in some applications of the capability approach or indeed in work on human development more generally. This argument, of course, echoes the broad thrust of some of the United Nations Development Programme’s work on human development, which is reflected in the inclusion of an indicator of participation in political life in its GEM.

David Crocker’s wide ranging paper is more supportive of Sen’s “democratic turn”. It has two distinct, if connected, elements relating, respectively, to participatory and democratic deliberation. In the first part of the paper, Crocker distinguishes between a variety of distinct forms of participation relevant to development projects. Crocker then submits Sabina Alkire’s approach to participatory development to scrutiny in the light of this analysis of the spectrum of varieties of participation. The relevant parts of Alkire’s work focus on a number of OXFAM projects in Pakistan. Crocker finds that the form of participation involved in these is a mixture of consultative participation – in as much as the funders consulted but made the final decisions themselves - and elements of deliberative participation in as much as nonelite groups did pursue a process leading to evaluative conclusions. Crocker concludes that “Alkire’s participatory model ... would be improved by injecting a strong dose of deliberative participation”.

In the second part of his paper, Crocker considers three objections to the use of deliberative democracy which are also often levelled at Sen’s arguments in favour of democracy in the application of the capability approach. The first “indeterminacy objection” focuses on the idea that asymmetries of power can be perpetuated rather than challenged by democratic processes. Crocker focuses on a version of this argument made by Nussbaum and responds to it at a number of levels. He rightly points out that the relevant problems with democratic processes arise not just for democracy but also for some of its competitors (i.e. they arise for decisions made by philosopher rulers and judgements made by justices of the Supreme court). The second, “autonomy objection” has to do with the idea that deliberative democrats are undermining the autonomy of those whom they are subjecting to democratic deliberation, when these people may reject democracy. Here Crocker gives a nuanced answer, suggesting that for people to reject democracy in an informed way involving critical scrutiny of claims in its favour and against would already constitute some limited form of democracy. He concedes that if group members do reject democracy after such scrutiny, the defender of autonomy must accept that decision. Deliberative democracy is offered as an option open to people which they can autonomously reject. Finally, he considers the “realism objection” that ideals of deliberative democracy are either “too utopian or ‘idealistic’” to be implemented or that if implemented would “reinforce or even deepen power imbalances”. Crocker responds to this by pointing to existing deliberative institutions and their successes in some contexts in “redistributing both power and opportunities”. The “ideal” of deliberative democracy is in his words “something to guide action and remedy shortcomings not an impossible dream”.

Best regards,

Kevin

Kevin Watkins
Director
Human Development Report Office
United Nations Development Programme

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Journal of HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Volume 8 Number 3 November 2007

Contents

Special Issue: Selected Papers from the 2006 International Conference of the Human Development and Capability Association

Lead Editors: Elizabeth Anderson, Andrea Brandolini, Richard Jolly and Mozaffar Qizilbash Assistant Editor: Solava Ibrahim

• Introduction: Challenges and Debates
  Mozaffar Qizilbash
  
• Liberty of Conscience: the Attack on Equal Respect
  Martha C. Nussbaum
  
• Toward Freedom from Domestic Violence: the Neglected Obvious
  Bina Agarwal and Pradeep Panda
  
• The Social Background of Capabilities for Freedoms
  Henry S. Richardson
  
• Capabilities and Satisfaction with Life
  Erik Schokkaert
  
• Deliberative Participation in Local Development
  David A. Crocker
  
• No Democracy without Justice: Political Freedom in Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach Sharath Srinivasan
  Bibliography on the Capability Approach, 2006-7
  Ingrid Robeyns
  
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledging Journal of Human Development Reviewers 2006-7
• Volume Index

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[1] This is a summary prepared by the JHD Managing Editor and the Assistant Editor of the Introduction by Mozaffar Qizilbash published in the Journal of Human Development Volume 8 Number 3 2007, which also includes the list of references cited.