The capabilities approach is arguably the most influential, recent innovation in debates about justice and poverty. Does it offer a convincing basis for an ecosocial understanding of poverty? This chapter explores three subjects – philosophy, social policy and environmentalism – in response to that question. My view is that for all its virtues, the capabilities approach contains serious flaws. First, it is not clear that it offers a secure enough grounding for ecosocial principles; and second, it has been too dismissive of the material-distributive paradigm (with specific reference to resources such as income and wealth), with all the attendant dangers we warned against in the Introduction earlier. That said, since the capabilities approach represents a broad church of opinion, offering a variety of perspectives on and responses to the ‘distributive paradigm’, neither should we reject it entirely. To this end, I adapt the concept of a meta-capability that will lead us into the discussion of resources that follows, in Chapter Two.

Philosophy

Outline

The central claim of the capabilities approach is that there is no straightforward metric of justice and wellbeing (Nussbaum, 2006, 2011; Sen, 2009; Anderson, 2010, pp 87-95). Those who focus on an ‘equality of welfare’ or an ‘equality of resources’ are being insufficiently comprehensive. The basic argument is this.

We can know approximately what it means to be well and to fare well. All humans (indeed, all living creatures) require adequate levels of nourishment, shelter, health, communal interaction, and so forth. But the capabilities required to realise these basic ‘functionings’ are highly diverse. Capabilities must imply some notion of substantive freedoms and opportunities, but what these mean will vary from context to context. The capabilities that you need in order to achieve a decent life will not be entirely identical to those in other geographical places and historical eras.

The originators of the capabilities approach part company at this point. Sen (2009, pp 231-47; see also Levine and Rizvi, 2005) believes that the best we can do is to mark out a ‘space of capabilities’ that equips people with the freedoms they need to live their lives as best they can. By contrast, Nussbaum (2006, pp 392-401) offers a list of capabilities that she holds to be universally applicable:

• • live a life of normal length;

• • possess bodily health and integrity;

• • cultivate and express imagination and thought;

• • form emotional attachments;