The Capability Approach: Insights for a New Poverty Focus

The concepts of poverty, social exclusion and deprivation are widely employed but often problematic. This paper discusses some problems with prominent interpretations of these concepts and how Amartya Sen’s capability approach can provide a conceptual framework that can overcome these problems. It is argued that the capability approach can reflect the many ways that human lives are blighted and that it thus offers a promising framework for poverty analysis. Six insights for poverty analysis provided by the capability approach are discussed. Introduction A framework for poverty analysis must seek to reflect societal change and economic shocks, such as the current crisis, in distinctly human terms. For this, we need the right concepts and measures. In this paper, we discuss some problems associated with existing approaches to conceptualising poverty, social exclusion and deprivation, and discuss the contribution that the capability approach might offer in resolving them. It is argued that the capability approach can provide a framework that can reflect the many ways in which human lives can be blighted, and which thus offers some promise for poverty analysis. This may come as some surprise to those familiar with the exchange between Sen and Peter Townsend in the 1980s (Sen, 1983, 1985; Townsend, 1985), which did little to endear the social policy community to Sen’s approach. However, there are at least two reasons why it is timely to reconsider the potential of the capability approach. First, in the years since the Sen−Townsend debate, the capability approach has become much more prominent. It has provided the conceptual underpinning for the UN’s Human Development Reports (UNDP, 2010), has influenced the understanding of well-being in the recent ‘Sarkozy Commission’ (Stiglitz et al., 2009) and has been the basis for the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s approach to monitoring equality in the UK (Burchardt and Vizard, 2011). Given this increased prominence, we might ask whether some advantages of the approach have been overlooked.