ethics and development: an introduction from the perspective of the capability approach

Ethics and Development: An Introduction from thePerspective of the Capability Approach

Severine Deneulin*University of Bath, Social and Policy Sciences, Claverton Down, University of Bath

Abstract

The paper argues that development, understood as the set of economic, social, cultural and politi-cal processes oriented towards improving people’s lives, is a normative project which rests on ethi-cal foundations. Working in international development requires therefore an ethical reflection.The paper discusses development ethics as an inter-disciplinary field of study. It describes oneleading contemporary ethical perspective in development studies, the capability approach, andexamines how it can be used to analyse concrete cases of development. It argues that the capabil-ity approach presents aspects of different ethical frameworks, each of which provides a distinctiveangle to the ethical analysis of development processes. The paper concludes with analysing adevelopment case in Peru using the capability approach.

Introduction

In 1800, life expectancy in the UK was only 40 years. In 2010, it was more than 80. InNepal, life expectancy doubled in the same period from 33 to 66 years.1 In 1970, onlytwo thirds of the Brazilian population could read and write. In 2010, more than 90%could. Even in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country ravaged by conflict duringmany years, literacy increased from 24% in 1970 to nearly 80% in 2010.2

Yet, despite these amazing gains, inequality remains entrenched. A child from a high-income family is less likely to die before five than a child from a low-income family. Insome countries, like Bolivia and Peru, this difference is fivefold.3 In countries like Indiaand China, if one is born a girl, she is less likely to survive.4 Globally, the Gini coeffi-cient is estimated to have risen from 0.43 in 1820 to reach 0.707 in 2002 – the coeffi-cient is 0 when all assets are shared equally and 1 when owned by one person. Iffinancial assets, property and savings are added to income, the coefficient is even higher.5

These significant gains in health and education must also be put within the backgroundof environmental considerations. Norway, the country currently enjoying the highestlevel of development as measured by life expectancy, schooling, and income, currentlyconsumes more than 3.1 times what would be required for global environmental sustain-ability (UNDP 2011, p. 65).6 How ought we to assess ‘development’, that is, whatcounts as gains or improvement in people’s lives, in light of the advances in human well-being and the problems of inequality and environmental sustainability?

Since it emerged as a specific field of inquiry, ‘development’ has been attributed differ-ent meanings, from technological innovation, wealth increase, income-poverty reduction,basic needs satisfaction, human rights guarantee, better livelihoods, to the MillenniumDevelopment Goals.7 The meaning of development is contested among people and orga-nizations from different professional, geographical and cultural backgrounds. The UN sys-tem and NGOs mainly endorse a view of development as respect for human rights. The

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World Bank and IMF, and economists, mainly see development as wealth increase andincome poverty reduction.

What development is depends on how one conceives ‘‘living well’’ or living ‘‘better’’human lives. The answer to the Socratic question of how one should live, and one mayadd of how a society should move into the future (Dower 2008), has never ceased to bedisputed. Conflicts between indigenous people and the governments of the states inwhich they live illustrate part of the dispute about how we should live, especially howone should relate to the land: as a natural resource to be used to bring economic andsocial benefits to a country, or as something which humans are part of and cannot beowned or sold under an individual property rights regime.8

The paper starts with describing the task of development ethics as articulated in theworks of Denis Goulet in development planning and Amartya Sen in economics. It thendiscusses the contribution of one of the most encompassing ethical frameworks for analy-sing concrete situations of injustice today, the capability approach.9 It explores how thecapability approach presents aspects of different ethical frameworks, and concludes byillustrating how the approach can be used to analyse development policy from an ethicalperspective. It considers the policy of support for export-oriented agriculture in Peru.

Development Ethics

In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, socialist thinkers like St Simonand Marx, and spiritual and religious leaders like Gandhi and Pope Leon XIII, had longbeen engaged in ethical reflection on economic development. They objected to the com-modification of labour and condemned the submission of human work and human life toprofit objectives.10 Gandhi especially condemned the colonial underpinnings of economicdevelopment and its reliance on labour and resource exploitation in the colonies. It ishowever not before the end of colonisation, and the appearance of ‘development studies’as a multi-disciplinary field of studies in the 1960s, that development ethics, defined as acritical ethical reflection on the meaning of development and how a society should moveinto the future, became a specialist academic subject. The works of American developmentplanner Denis Goulet were the first contributions to this ‘new discipline’ (Goulet 1997).11

The purpose of development, Goulet argued, was not more technology or greaterwealth, but enabling people to become more human (Goulet 1971). Goulet had beendeeply influenced by his mentor, the economist Louis-Joseph Lebret. When serving as aCatholic priest in the 1930s in the fishing sector in Brittany, Lebret witnessed first-handthe human costs of putting profits before people. Lebret’s research centre Economie et Hu-manisme, sought to reform the economy in order to orient it towards human needs.12

Goulet worked closely with Lebret to develop what became the field of ‘developmentethics’. The task of development ethics, he wrote, ‘‘is to assure that the painful changeslaunched under the banner of development do not result in antidevelopment, whichdestroys cultures and individuals and exacts undue sacrifices in suffering and societal well-being – all in the name of profit, some absolutized ideology, or a supposed efficiencyimperative’’ (Goulet 1995, p. 27, 1997, p. 1169).

Goulet (1995, p. 8) identified four areas constitutive of the subject matter of develop-ment ethics:

1) Debates over goals: economic growth, basic needs, cultural survival, ecological balance, trans-fers of power from one class to another; 2) Divergent notions of power, legitimacy, authority,governance, competing political systems; 3) Competition over resources and over rules of access

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to resources, competing economic systems; and 4) Pervasive conflicts between modern modesof living (with their peculiar rationality, technology, social organization, and behaviours) andtraditional ways of life.13

The following salient aspects of the case of the building of a hydro-electric dam inPanama, on the land of the Naso indigenous community, illustrates quite strikingly thatquestions about the nature of the good life, how to redistribute resources, who has legiti-mate authority and how to relate to nature, cannot be avoided in development planningand policy.14 First, for most Nasos, the goal of development is to enable them to con-tinue living in the land of their ancestors in harmony with the natural environment. Incontrast, the Panamanian government’s goal is to generate growth in economic outputbased on renewable energy sources. Second, the Naso people do not recognize the legiti-macy of the authority of the Panamanian government over their territory. They havetheir own customary forms of governance, separate from the country’s formal politicalsystem. Third, there is competition over natural resources. Both the Naso people and thegovernment claim use of the land and river for different purposes. Fourth, there are con-flicts about how people should live, whether as a farming community in a rural settle-ment or as waged labour in an urban settlement. These conflicts are not only at the levelof the Panamanian society but also among the Naso people who are divided on whetherto support the dam project or resist it.

Goulet’s writings were deeply rooted in the practice of development planning andimplementation of development projects. He did not engage much with academic theo-rizing, but considered it too disconnected from most of lived reality (Gasper 2008). Eco-nomics, and its little concern for ethical questions, continued to be the most powerfuldiscipline of development studies. It is not until Amartya Sen reconnected economicswith moral philosophy in the 1980s with his theoretical works in social choice and wel-fare economics that ethics re-entered economics.

In a short book entitled Ethics and Economics, Sen contends that the ‘‘engineering’’approach to economics has dominated too much the discipline to the detriment of theethical approach. The former, he writes, ‘‘is characterized by being concerned with pri-marily logistic issues rather than with ultimate ends and such questions as what may foster‘the good of man’ or ‘how should one live?’. The ends are taken as fairly straightfor-wardly given, and the object of the exercise is to find the appropriate means to servethem’’ (Sen 1987, pp. 3–4). Sen argues that the choice of appropriate means cannot beseparated from a discussion of the ends they serve. What is the purpose of increasing eco-nomic output? What is the objective of price liberalization? Are trade liberalization mea-sures always appropriate? Deliberation about which ends should be pursued, and whichmeans are most appropriate for these ends, characterizes what Sen calls the ‘‘ethicalapproach’’ to economics. Sen (1995, p. 16) compares the failure to deliberate about endsto ‘‘a decision expert whose response to seeing a man engaged in slicing his toes with ablunt knife is to rush to advise him that he should use a sharper knife to better serve hisevident objective’’. It is in this context of reconnecting deliberation about ends andmeans and recovering the ethical foundations of economics that Sen formulated whatcame to be known as the ‘‘capability approach’’.15

The Capability Approach

Sen first introduced the concept of ‘‘capability’’ in his 1979 Tanner Lectures on HumanValues (Sen 1980) as an alternative space for assessing wellbeing to the utility or

Ethics and development 219


commodity space (Sen 1985, 1988, 1992, 1993, 1999). Women abused by their husbandsmay say that they are happy because they have adapted to social norms that hold that suf-fering is part of women’s lot. A family may have considerable assets but the daughtersmay not go to school because of social norms that hold that a woman’s place is at home.A family may have a car but may be unable to travel because of restriction of freedom ofmovement. Thus, the amount of resources a person has, or the preferences she expresses,are not always a good indication of what s ⁄he is able to do or be, such as being healthyand safe from violence, being educated or travelling. This is why, Sen argues, wellbeingis better assessed in the space of capabilities, which he defines as ‘‘the real opportunitythat we have to accomplish what we value being or doing’’ (Sen 1992; p. 31),16 thanresources or subjective preferences.

The capability approach is foremost an evaluation framework to assess states of affairs(Alkire 2005). One situation is better than another if more people have more opportuni-ties to achieve a set of valuable beings and doings such as being educated, being healthy,being respected, working and participating in public life. In his Idea of Justice, Sen usesthe capability approach as a comparative framework to assess justice (Sen 2009). A situa-tion is more just than another if people have more opportunities to do or be what theyvalue being and doing. Injustice lies in the denial of these opportunities. When a womanis forced to work at a low wage with no guarantee for labour rights, this situation isunjust because it leaves her with few opportunities to do or be what she values, forexample, having meaningful work, having a say in matters that affect her, raising a family,living in decent accommodation, resting, etc.

Sen has notoriously refrained from being prescriptive about what constitute valuablecapabilities (Sen 1992, 2004). Given the variety of contexts, he argues that it is better toleave the matter open and incomplete. He leaves it up to public discussion for specifyingthe capabilities ‘‘that people have reason to value’’ (Sen 1992, p. 81). For example, pro-cesses of public deliberation in a village council in India may conclude that the opportu-nity to collect seeds from previous crops is a highly valuable capability. Processes ofpublic deliberation in a London borough may conclude that the opportunity for afford-able housing is a highly valuable capability.

The capability approach is agency-centred (Crocker 2008). It is not prescriptive aboutwhat constitutes valuable capabilities and how these should be expanded, whetherthrough social protection programmes, universal welfare provision, cooperative or capital-ist enterprises. As such it is not a theory of justice. It does not specify how assets and landshould be redistributed. It is limited to being an evaluative framework for assessing thesuccess or failure of policies and for judging whether one situation is better or more justthan another. In sum, it provides a frame for analysing socio-economic processes from anethical perspective but what goes into the frame is not pre-determined. This is why thecapability approach combines different ethical aspects. Some aspects will be more salientaccording to the context and purpose of the analysis. Three major aspects are underlined.

CONSEQUENTIALIST ASPECT

Sen framed his capability approach as an alternative to utilitarianism (Sen and Williams1982). According to Sen (1999, pp. 58–59), utilitarianism makes three claims: all choicesmust be judged by their consequences; judgements of state of affairs are restricted to theutility space (utility is defined in terms of revealed preferences or subjective satisfaction);and the goodness, or rightness, of one’s action is the sum of all the utilities generatedby it.



The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, published in 2006 by theUK government, is an example of how a reality can be analysed from a utilitarian per-spective and how policy recommendations can be derived from it. The Review examinesall the consequences of climate change on the overall utility levels of countries, which itapproximates by gross domestic product, and concludes that if no policy to reduce carbonemissions is taken, general utility levels will decrease dramatically in the future.

The capability approach rejects utilitarianism but maintains some form of consequentialevaluation. It holds that, when deciding what action to take, one must take into accountthe consequences of one’s action but the capability approach broadens the consequentialevaluation space to include considerations about valuable capabilities, human rights orrespect of procedural principles. What information to include will depend on the contextof the evaluation, who is evaluating and for what purpose (Sen 2000). The HumanDevelopment Index, which assesses the progress of countries according to the conse-quences of their policies for three valuable capabilities (capability to live long, to be edu-cated, and to live up to a certain economic standard), illustrates the consequentialistaspect of the capability approach when it is used as an ethical framework for analysingpublic policy. Multi-dimensional poverty measures, such as the Multi-Poverty Index, areanother example.17 What these measures seek to do is to assess states of affairs beyondutility levels to include capability considerations – even if the measures they include aremere proxies of capabilities, such as ‘life expectancy’ or ‘morbidity rate’ to assess theopportunities people have to live long and healthy lives.

ARISTOTELIAN ASPECT

Another aspect of the capability approach is its foundations in Aristotelian ethics. Theworks of philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum have played here a pivotal role(Nussbaum 1990, 1992, 1993, 2000, 2006, 2011). She draws on Aristotelian ethics tomake the capability approach ‘‘a partial account of social justice’’ (Nussbaum 2006, p.291). She does so by proposing a list of central human capabilities which sets the evalu-ative standards for social justice and which holds government accountable for providingopportunities for people to live flourishing human lives. The central human capabilitiesare: capability to live a life of normal length; capability for bodily health; capability forbodily integrity; capability to think and reason, this includes guarantees of freedom ofexpression; capability to express emotions; capability to engage in critical reflectionabout the planning of one’s life; capability to engage in social interaction and have thesocial bases of self-respect; capability to live with concern for the natural environment;capability to laugh and play; capability to control one’s environment, this includesparticipation in political choices that govern one’s life and work (Nussbaum 2000, pp.77–78).

When its Aristotelian aspect is emphasised, the capability approach involves makingjudgements about what constitutes a good human life and what types of institutions bestsecure a good human life for all. From an Aristotelian ethics viewpoint, a good society isone in which people relate to each other as citizen, deliberating together about how tocreate the conditions for each to live well as humans (Sandel 2009).

Thus, analysing development from the perspective of the capability approach meansthat, in addition to capability outcomes, the evaluation space for analysing public policywill also include information about the way people relate to each other. If one takes theexample of climate change, it will not be sufficient to analyze the consequences of cli-mate change for individual capabilities, one will also need to include information about



the quality of relationships between people and their environment, whether characterisedby respect or by domination.18

LIBERAL ASPECT

In contemporary Anglo-Saxon political philosophy, liberalism has been the dominant eth-ical framework, and the liberal aspect of the capability approach has been most discussed(Robeyns 2009). One of the features of liberalism is its emphasis on individual freedomand the respect for people to choose their own conception of the good.19 Liberalism,philosophically speaking, should however not be confused with neo-liberalism as an eco-nomic doctrine. Neo-liberalism is concerned with minimizing state regulation and restric-tion on people’s freedom to produce, exchange and buy economic goods. In contrast,liberalism is concerned with positive freedom, with giving people opportunities to pursuetheir own conception of the good. This means that they must have access to certain fun-damentals such as access to health care, education, food, adequate housing and have cer-tain fundamental rights guaranteed like political participation and freedom of expression.Liberalization of markets may sometimes limit these opportunities

In its liberal aspect, the capability approach holds that the assessment of justice rests on‘the freedoms [people] actually enjoy to choose between different ways of living that theycan have reason to value’ (Sen 1990, p. 115). It does not presuppose a comprehensiveview of the good in the sense that it does not specify what a ‘‘good’’ way of living is.Moreover, the relevant space for the evaluation of states of affairs rests on the opportuni-ties people have to accomplish valuable beings and doings (capabilities) rather than onvaluable beings and doings themselves (functionings). Sen has often used the fastingmonk ⁄ starving child example to illustrate the distinction: even if both have the samefunctioning level (nutritional deficiency), the monk has the freedom to be well nourishedbut chooses not to, the child does not have such freedom.

Nussbaum’s version of the capability approach also has a liberal aspect, despite itsstrongest Aristotelian foundations. Since the mid-1990s, Nussbaum no longer views herlist of central human capabilities as constituents of good human living but she views it asa list of opportunities that people need to have access to in order to pursue whatever wayof life they wish to live. If they do not make use of these opportunities (such as theopportunity to exercise practical reason or to participate in public affairs) through theirown free choice, this should be respected (Nussbaum 2000, 2011).

COMBINING WITH OTHER ETHICAL FRAMEWORKS

Given its multiple aspects, the capability approach can be combined with other ethicalframeworks, such as feminist ethics, environmental ethics, religious ethics and non-Western ethics, to name a few. It is combined with feminist ethics to analyse genderinjustice (Agarwal et al. 2006; Nussbaum 2000). There is work currently undertaken tocombine the capability approach with environmental ethics and construct an account ofenvironmental justice from a capability perspective (Holland 2008; Schlosberg 2009). Thecapability approach is used in theology and combined with Christian ethics to build aconception of social justice based on the belief of the existence of God (Cahill 2006;Sagovsky 2008). There are also attempts to form an account of social justice from anindigenous cosmovision perspective using the capability approach (Watene 2011).

The versatility and openness of the capability approach is one of its greatest strengths.It presents different aspects at different times, depending on the context and purpose of



analysis. The next section examines a concrete case of development in Peru from the eth-ical perspective of the capability approach and illustrates its different aspects. All dataabout the case is taken from the Report ‘Drop by Drop: Understanding the impacts ofthe UK’s water footprint through a case study of Peruvian asparagus’, published in 2009and written by the civil society organizations Progressio, the Centro Peruano de EstudiosSociales and Water Witness International.20

Development Ethics in Practice

In the early 1990s, the Peruvian government gave incentives for the cultivation of exportcrops to stimulate economic growth. Agro-businesses received special tax exemptions andimport tax exemptions were granted on some products with the US and other trade part-ners. Farmers and businesses in the Ica valley, a coastal area 400 km south of Lima, pro-gressively decided to switch from cotton to an all year production of asparagus as thelatter crop had become much more lucrative than cotton. The area cultivated for aspara-gus grew from four hectares in 1986 to 9,610 hectares in 2009. Today, Peru is the largestexporter of fresh asparagus in the world and the Ica valley produces 95% of Peru’s aspara-gus. Forty per cent of the working population of the Ica region is employed in the aspar-agus industry, and there is full employment.

But the export-boom not only brings benefits, it also brings costs. The asparagus indus-try is highly water intensive and aquifers are running low. It is estimated that, at currentrates of exploitation, a third of the city’s supplies will dry in the next 25 years. Somefamilies in the valley are already limited to 10 l of water per day while the WHO recom-mends 50 l per person per day to meet health standards. Big agro-businesses have thefinancial means to dig deeper wells to irrigate the asparagus, but medium and small scalefarmers have to use superficial water which is running scarce. It is increasingly difficultfor them to cultivate asparagus, and shifting to other crops is no longer profitable enoughto make a living. Moreover, the overexploitation of water down the valley is creatingwater problems higher up in the Andes. Indigenous communities whose livelihoodsdepend on land are not only finding it difficult to cope with the reality of climate changebut also face increasing water contamination and limited water supply created by theasparagus boom. Their animal flocks are dying due to changing weather patterns andcontaminated water. The Ica region seems to be confronted with an unsolvable ethicaldilemma: the livelihood of the population now entirely depends on asparagus cultivationwhich is also depriving them of water and is damaging their livelihoods in the long term,for there will soon be no water neither for cultivating asparagus nor for living.

How should we analyse this concrete case of ‘development’ from the ethical perspec-tive of the capability approach? If one focuses on its consequentialist aspect, one wouldask the question whether the asparagus boom has expanded the ‘‘capabilities the Icainhabitants have reason to value’’. If one emphasizes its liberal aspect, what constitutesvaluable capabilities has to be left entirely to processes of public reasoning among thepopulation of the Ica valley itself.If one emphasizes its Aristotelian aspect, the consequen-tial evaluation is conducted on the basis of an indicative list of central human capabilitieswhich are an approximation of what constitutes good human living. Let us consider thecapabilities to be healthy, to work, and to live in a place of one’s choice.

The capability to be employed and live beyond subsistence means has increased (thereis full employment in the region and the salaries are reported to be decent). This likelymeans more opportunities for better housing and more opportunities for children toattend school. However, with water supplies dwindling, more inhabitants are unable to



adequately wash, to prepare food and live normal daily lives. Indigenous people in theAndes have fewer opportunities to breed alpacas and make a living from it. Medium andsmall scale farmers who have lived for generations in the valley will soon be forced toleave the land because of water shortage, unlike the agro-businesses which arrived in the1990s and will leave once there are better investment opportunities elsewhere. In sum,the picture is mixed. On the one hand, some people have more opportunities to be ordo what they have reason to value, assuming they value the opportunity to live in betterhousing conditions and work. On the other, these opportunities are not sustainable in thelong run, for employment in the Ica valley region will cease in the near future because ofwater shortage, and other people, like the indigenous people who live in the mountains,have fewer opportunities to work and live in the place of their choice because of theintensive water use in the Ica valley.21

But the capability approach does not only have a consequentialist aspect. The purposeof the evaluation exercise is not simply to evaluate but to change the policies and actionsthat have led to these consequences ⁄ outcomes. The capability approach can also be usedas a partial theory of social justice, offering a diagnosis of the institutional and policy fail-ures that are responsible for these outcomes.22

The Ica region has not arrived at this ethical dilemma today through natural causes butthrough a series of human decisions over the last 30 years: the Peruvian government’sdecision to support export-oriented agro-businesses, the pressure of the World Bank todo so (the International Finance Corporation is the biggest investor in the asparagus busi-ness in the Ica valley), the decision of Western consumers to eat asparagus all year round,poor water regulation which has allowed agro-businesses to dig wells at unsustainable rates,lack of government environmental control and corruption.23

If one analysed the export-oriented policy of the Peruvian government from the ethi-cal perspective of the capability approach emphasizing its Aristotelian aspect, one wouldhighlight that the ethical dilemma in which the Ica valley finds itself today is due to amassive failure of public reasoning about the good life in common. There has been littlecritical reasoning in the 1990s of whether the decision to invest in asparagus and promoteexport-oriented agro-businesses was a good way to promote the common good, to pro-vide the conditions for each and all inhabitants of the Ica region and beyond to live agood human life. On the basis of the Aristotelian aspect of the capability approach, onewould advocate not only measures to tackle corruption and improve water regulation forsustainable use, but also and foremost a public deliberation process about what kind ofeconomic activities would best ensure the good of all.

This is precisely what social movements, like Via Campesina, are doing.24 The move-ment is reclaiming the public space to deliberate about what kind of society best ensuresthe good of all. It questions the type of economic model that Peru, and others, has fol-lowed and the kind of people and attitudes that this model nurtures. The choice ofexport-oriented crops, and the support to big agro-businesses over small-scale farmers,does not nurture relationships of respect towards the environment but submits the envi-ronment to the logic of profits, for a few.25 Via Campesina proposes a model of economicdevelopment around sustainable and small-scale farming oriented towards local and regio-nal consumption.

Conclusion

The paper has argued that ethical reflection lies at the heart of the development project,for development is unavoidably based on a certain class of values on what counts as



‘‘good’’ social change. It has proposed the capability approach as an ethical perspective toanalyse development processes. The capability approach is foremost an evaluation frame-work for assessing states of affairs and holds that ‘capabilities’, defined as opportunitiespeople have to be or do what they have reason value, constitute the most relevant infor-mational basis of social justice. But the capability approach contains different aspects andcan be combined with different ethical frameworks that then link it to specific accountsof social justice.

In its consequentlist aspect, the capability approach can be used as a comparative accountof justice (Sen 2009). A sate of affairs is more just than another if people enjoy a biggercapability set. In its liberal aspect, the capability approach can be used as a partial theory ofjustice which specifies obligations that governments have towards their citizens, namelysecuring the conditions for them to pursue their chosen conception of the good life(Nussbaum 2000, 2011). In its Aristotelian aspect, the capability approach can be used anaccount of justice which stresses the role of institutions and virtues in enabling people to livegood human lives (Nussbaum 1992; Sandel 2009). Goulet wrote nearly 50 years ago thatdevelopment was about giving opportunities for people to become more human. But what isit to become more human? In this question lies the nucleus of the development project.

Short Biography

Severine Deneulin is a Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath,UK. Her research is on ethics and international development from the perspective of thecapability approach, and on religion and social justice. She has published numerous arti-cles on these topics in academic journals. Her books include Religion in Development:Rewriting the Secular Script (Zed Books, 2009), and An Introduction to the Human Develop-ment and Capability Approach (Earthscan, 2009). She holds an MSc in Economics from theUniversity of Louvain (Belgium) and a DPhil in Development Studies from the Univer-sity of Oxford.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Severine Deneulin, University of Bath, Social and Policy Sciences, Claverton Down,University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

1 See http://www.gapminder.org for a visual rendition of the long term trends in health and life expectancy since1800.2 Literacy data taken from the 20th anniversary Human Development Report (UNDP, 2010).3 See the atlas on global inequality at http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/intracountry.php.4 See the 2010 UN report ‘Power, voice and rights: A turning point for gender equality in Asia and the Pacific’ athttp://www.ungei.org/resources/index_2658.html.5 Data from UNICEF report on global inequality at http://www.childimpact.unicef-irc.org/en/desk-reviews/glo-bal-inequality.6 This estimation is based on the ecological footprint of consumption, which measures the area of land and seaneeded to regenerate the resources that a country consumes (UNDP, 2011, p. 65).7 For a discussion of the concept of development, see Chari and Corbridge (2008), Cowen and Shenton (1996),Escobar (1995), Hettne (2009), Rist (2009), Sachs (2009), Sen (1988).8 See Bebbington and Humphreys (2011) and Robinson and Tormey (2009).9 For a discussion of development ethics beyond the capability approach, see Gasper (2012) and the InternationalDevelopment Ethics Association at http://www.development-ethics.org.10 The encyclical by pope Leon XIII ‘Rerum Novarum’ published in 1891 emphasised the priority of labour overcapita. The document has been a landmark for labour movements and the struggles for labour rights in Europe.11 See Gasper (2008) for a summary and assessment of Goulet’s work, and Gasper and St Clair (2010) for a collec-tion of main articles published in the area of development ethics.



12 Lebret became a major influence on the Catholic Church’s thinking on development and drafted the encyclicalPopulorum Progressio (‘On the Progress of People’). For an abridged and contemporary version of the 1967 docu-ment, see http://www.progressio.org.uk/sites/default/files/This-is-Progress.pdf.13 See also Gasper (2004) and Goulet (2006).14 For a description of the dam building case, see, among others, the video ‘Message to the world of the Nasoindigenous people of Panama’ at http://vimeo.com/37544203. For a discussion of the ethical questions that arisefrom displacement by development, see Penze et al. (2011).15 For an introduction to the capability approach, see Alkire and Deneulin (2009), Gasper (2007), Nussbaum(2011) and Robeyns (2011). For its relation to development ethics, see Crocker (1991) and Gasper (1997).16 The concept of ‘‘capability’’ has to be clearly distinguished from that of ‘‘choice’’. For example, increasing choicesin health services, such as the choice between a private or public hospital, does not constitute a capability increase, asthe privatization of health care may decrease the opportunity people, especially those from low-income groups, haveto be healthy. The idea of capabilities is close to that of rights, see Sen (2005) and Vizard et al. (2011).17 See the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at http://www.ophi.org.uk.18 See Alexander (2010) for an elaboration of why the capabilities approach needs to include a republican under-standing of freedom as non-dominating relationships and not simply as individual opportunities.19 For an introduction to liberalism, and its critiques, see Mulhall and Swift (1996).20 The full report can be read at http://www.progressio.org.uk/sites/default/files/Drop-by-drop_Progressio_Sept-2010.pdf.21 In their application of the capability approach to social policy, Wolff and De-Shalit (2007) have argued that theconcept of capability has to be understood more in terms of the freedom to sustain functionings in the future thanfreedom of choice. They define a capability as ‘genuine opportunity to sustain functioning’ (p. 74).22 Alkire (2008) distinguishes the evaluative and prospective uses of the capability approach.23 The ‘Drop by Drop’ report cited earlier estimates that 150 out of the 800 wells in use illegal, and only one ofthe five drilling companies has been legally licensed to dig (p. 69).24 See http://viacampesina.org/en, click on ‘Organisation’ for a description of what the movement is.25 The ‘Drop by Drop’ report estimates the retail value of fresh Peruvian asparagus in the UK at £55 million eachyear, but its street value in Ica at only £1.54 million (p. 64). The few who have benefited most from the asparagusboom have been the agro-exporters and supermarkets, not the farmers.

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