Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach

Description

If a country's Gross Domestic Product increases each year, but so does the percentage of its people deprived of basic education, health care, and other opportunities, is that country really making progress? If we rely on conventional economic indicators, can we ever grasp how the world's billions of individuals are really managing? In this powerful critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect. For the past twenty-five years, Nussbaum has been working on an alternate model to assess human development: the Capabilities Approach. She and her colleagues begin with the simplest of questions: What is each person actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them? The Capabilities Approach to human progress has until now been expounded only in specialized works. Creating Capabilities, however, affords anyone interested in issues of human development a wonderfully lucid account of the structure and practical implications of an alternate model. Preface ix 1. A Woman Seeking Justice 1 2. The Central Capabilities 17 3. A Necessary Counter-Theory 46 4. Fundamental Entitlements 69 5. Cultural Diversity 101 6. The Nation and Global Justice 113 7. Philosophical Influences 123 8. Capabilities and Contemporary Issues 143 Conclusion 185 Postscript 188 Appendix A: Heckman on Capabilities 193 Appendix B: Sen on Well-Being and Agency 197 Chapter Notes 203 Bibliography 211 Acknowledgments 231 Index 233