Capability Approach

The capability approach (henceforth CA) is a normative framework whose main focus is human diversity and substantive freedom. Because of its consideration of plurality of well-being, agency and freedom, it provides a useful theoretical framework to study the biographical narratives, in order to analyse the role of agency and structure in the participation and negotiations within the family, community and public institutions.

Capabilities

This paper uses the CA to shed light on issues of well-being, vulnerability and deprivation. The CA was first formulated by Amartya Sen in the 1980s as an alternative position to measures of poverty and inequality based on income. Rather than looking at commodities or primary goods

per se, Sen focuses on “the relevant personal characteristics that govern the conversion of

primary goods into the person’s ability to promote her ends” (Sen, 1999: 74). Thus, Sen defines functionings as “the various things a person may value doing or being” (1999: 75); whereas capabilities would then refer “to the alternative combinations of functionings that are feasible for her to achieve” (1999:75), or as Robeyns suggests: “what people are effectively able to do and to be” (2005: 94).

Sen argued that economic measurements failed to take into account the differences between income and well-being that might result from variations such as personal heterogeneities, environmental diversities, variations in social climate, differences in relational perspectives and distribution within the family (Sen, 1999:70-71). Thus, the concept of capabilities refers both to

individual’s characteristics and goals. The CA allows for the study of women who despite earning a reasonable salary send most of this income in remittances to their country of origin, lowering their quality of life. It also looks at the frustration that may arise from being qualified in their home country, but being offered unskilled jobs in the country of destination.

Although there seem to be a consensus on the definition of capabilities and functionings, the operationalisation of capabilities varies depending on the author. According to Martha Nussbaum, Sen’s use of the CA focuses on “comparative measurement of quality of life” (2007: 70). She sees the CA as “an account of core human entitlements that should be respected and implemented by the governments of all nations, as a bare minimum of what respect for human dignity requires” (2007: 70). These core human entitlements are sketched in her list of central human capabilities: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; control over one’s environment (Nussbaum, 2007: 76-77); whereas Sen does not endorse any specific list of capabilities (2004, 2009; Robeyns, 2005).

The CA, as a normative framework, considers that there is a plurality of well-being dimensions related to the concept of capabilities and functionings. Well-being is therefore related to both the capability set – “alternative functioning vectors that [a person] can choose from” (Sen, 1999:75) and to functionings, which vary from elementary matters (such as being well-nourished and healthy) to more complex doings or beings (such as self-respect, preserving human dignity, participating in decision making processes and taking an active part in the community) (Nussbaum and Sen, 2009: 3). Because of human heterogeneity, individuals might attach different value to each of these functionings (Sen, 2009: 31). Thus, well-being is related to a capability which in its turn is related to freedom; substantial freedom to carry out one’s plan of life.

Because of its focus on human diversity, the CA “is a promising evaluative framework for gender inequalities” (Robeyns, 2001:1) as well as ethnic, class and age inequalities, since it takes into account personal and structural conversion factors that modify the translation of resources into functionings. The CA is especially useful for studying the well-being of young people of migrant background looking at the dynamics within the family, their social interactions and their participation (or lack of it) in public institutions. This approach facilitates the analysis of whether their condition as young people, having a migrant background and their gender pose barriers to carrying out their plan of life. Robeyns holds that there are three types of conversion factors: personal, social and environmental (2005: 99). Social structures affect men’s and women’s well-

being differently (Robeyns, 2001:2); together with class and racial differences in real freedoms and opportunities.

Thus the CA allows us to articulate ideas of well-being, good life and participation whilst taking into account social circumstances and human diversity. The CA also studies the role of agency by focusing on the individual selection of beings and doings that a person performs according to their values (Barrientos, 2007: 14). The CA can enlighten public policies to take into account migrant situations such as the deprivation of capabilities consequence of strict immigration laws that render a great number of migrants illegal in the host country, forcing them to live in the margins of society. It can, for instance, be used to criticise welfare policies that give priority to male-breadwinner models and encourage unpaid household and childminding work for women, advocating instead flexible working conditions and public child care facilities.

The CA is appropriate for the study of young people of Ecuadorian background because of its focus on substantive or real freedom to pursue the goals that the individual has reason to value. It does not presume what goals these would or should be, allowing for a plurality of personal goals. For instance, it does not judge whether the supposed Latin American family and community oriented goals are better or worse than European individualistic goals. However, it does look at human advantage and inequality of capabilities that might be the result of the personal and social conditions as young persons, men or women, immigrants, belonging to a determined socio- economic status; inequalities with family income and the distribution of household chores, which might foster boys to study and work whilst imposing a greater share of the household chores on girls, etc. Thus, the CA is especially suited to study plural forms of well-being that reflect human diversity.

Well-being

This research uses the informants’ perspective on well-being, in line with the CA, which understands that there is a plurality of well-being due to human heterogeneity. According to Sen, well-being achievement is “an evaluation of the ‘wellness’ of the person’s state of being […] seen from the perspective of her own personal welfare” (Sen, 2009: 36). Thus, well-being is multidimensional and “there are relevant dimensions of well-being that the economic resources are not able to capture” (Martinetti, 2000: 3).

The CA shifts from the utilitarian idea of well-being based on utility and econometric measures, and focuses on people’s capabilities. Because of its holistic scope, well-being is difficult to measure under the CA. One needs to pay attention to income, but also life expectancy, health

speech, time and space for creativity, leisure, and so forth (Nussbaum and Sen, 2009). This holistic scope may result in non commensurability, since it seems difficult to “reduce all the things we have reason to value into one homogenous magnitude” (Sen, 2009: 239) as the utilitarian calculus would intend. But, as Sen argues, in our daily lives we are forced to choose between options that cannot be measured against each other, such as deciding what to cook for dinner, what school we should send our children to, whether to leave a violent partner and so on.

When these choices are not trivial, but have public consequences, the CA as a normative framework seems to advise public discussion and deliberation (Sen, 2009: 242). The goal of these decisions should be enhancing capabilities to further human advantage. Regarding this human advantage Sen makes a fourfold distinction: “(1) ‘well-being achievement’, (2) ‘agency achievement’, (3) ‘well-being freedom’, and (4) ‘agency freedom’”. (Sen, 2009: 35). Thus, Sen distinguishes between the achievement or the state of attainment of goals and the freedom to pursue and achieve those goals, i.e. between the process and the result. “Well-being achievement […] can be seen as the evaluation of the ‘well-ness’ of the person’s state of being” (Sen, 2009: 36). Following this argument, wellness is connected to the person’s functionings. “Agency achievement” is related to the individual’s success in pursuing his or her goals. “Well-being freedom [refers to] a person’s actual freedom to live well and be well” (Sen, 2009:39). Sen considers that the good life is a life of genuine choice of real freedoms (Sen, 1985:69-70), thus, freedom has intrinsic rather than only procedural value for well-being. As a result, education policies exclusively concerned with the number of people of migration background enrolled in formal schooling and their results would disregard the process freedom of whether these individuals had substantial opportunities to choose the type of school, curriculum or pedagogy that they deemed valuable.

If well-being represents the achievement of goals and functionings; the freedom to pursue these goals, is also a dimension of well-being, what Sen calls “agency freedom”. Thus, agency can be understood as the ability to make decisions and formulate plans of life, whereas well-being is the dynamic attainment of goals. “Agency goals” are the aims that a person has reason to value, which in some cases could be considered adaptive preferences. Although, as we have seen, the ability to pursuit one’s plan of life is intimately related to the concept of well-being, some plans of life may lead to further vulnerability and capability deprivation. Adaptive preferences are desires and expectations that lead to low levels of objective well-being (Robeyns, 2001:15). “The deprived people tend to come to terms with their deprivation because of the sheer necessity of survival, and they may, as a result, lack the courage to demand any radical change, and may even

adjust their desires and expectations to what they unambitiously see as feasible” (Sen, 1999: 63, and Sen, 2009: 283).

Agency is intrinsically linked to the circumstances surrounding the individual and the capability set available. “Agency is formed by a specific range of cultural schemas or resources available in a person’s particular social milieu […] What kinds of desires people can have, what intentions they can form, and what sorts of creative transpositions they can carry out vary dramatically from one social world to another depending on the nature of the particular structures that inform those social worlds. Occupancy of different social positions — as defined, for example, by gender, wealth, social prestige, class, ethnicity, occupation, generation, sexual preference, or education — gives people knowledge of different schemas and access to different kinds and amounts of resources and hence different possibilities for transformative action” (Sewel, 1992: 20-21). Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ explain the dialectical relationship between the individual’s agency and the contextual environment, where the ‘field’ or contextual circumstances, such as structuring positions of age, ethnicity, class and gender, shape but do not completely determine the individual’s capabilities and functionings.

Thus, well-being is intimately linked to the concept of functioning but also freedom. “Well- being, in this view, is a matter of attained states and activities, and freedom to achieve well-being is a matter of the combinations of states and activities within a person’s reach” (Risse, 2009:14). In the context of second generation immigrants, we should then study the personal and social conversion factors that expand or constrain the individual’s capabilities, paying particular attention to Sen’s distinction between well-being and agency, achievement and freedom. The aim of this research is to identify those factors that decrease their well-being. Since a low set of capabilities tends to result in a decrease in well-being, the aspects of substantive freedom versus forced-choice are crucial. The next section will discuss capability deprivation or “unfreedom” (Sen, 2009:83).

Capability Deprivation

Unfortunately, in every society there are structural inequalities that systematically deprive groups from pursuing their plans of life. Sexism and racism are just two of these forms of oppression that lower the well-being of large numbers of individuals worldwide. This section analyses different efforts to identify and address these inequalities.

Poverty

Most efforts to measure well-being have been linked to the idea of poverty. The quest to find a universal definition of poverty has encountered different historical attempts. From economic or scientific: based mainly on income – such as the World Bank $1 a day from 1985; to the focus on subsistence, based on the minimal resources for survival, i.e. the minimum required for maintenance of physical efficiency – calorific requirement. More holistic attempts were based on the idea of basic needs: requirements for physical integrity, and personal autonomy (Doyal and Gough 1991); and the multiple deprivation index that accounted for the minimum resources necessary to participate in society (Townsend 1993:36). The source of the controversy stems from the implications of the definition, i.e., who is embraced and who is left out, what measures follow from it, what resources should be provided, and by whom, what needs should be prioritize, and so forth.

Poverty can be understood as capability deprivation (Sen: 1999), as a lack of multiple freedoms to promote functioning one has reason to value (Alkire, 2007). “What the capability perspective does in poverty analysis is to enhance the understanding of the nature and causes of poverty and deprivation by shifting primary attention away from means […] to ends that people have reason to pursue, and, correspondingly, to the freedoms to be able to satisfy these ends” (Sen 1999:90). Thus, the CA offers a holistic perspective on poverty that takes into account personal and structural conversion factors that the analysis of income distribution neglects. It also shifts the focus from instrumental to intrinsically important functionings.

This holistic perspective can unveil social and interfamilial inequalities such as female dependency on husbands in traditionally male-breadwinner societies, where despite having a reasonable family income, women might be deprived and forced into unpaid housework and family care (Nussbaum, 2000). Looking at poverty as capability deprivation also sheds light on the situation of immigrants who are often discriminated against and usually have to accept inferior working conditions even when being legal residents in the host country (Crenshaw, 1991, Solé Puig and Parella, 2009). The CA allows for what Nancy Fraser (1989) calls a “politics of needs interpretation”, giving voice to the needs of the oppressed; thus, making public, and addressing the needs of, vulnerable people that would prompt for a politics of recognition, redistribution and representation leading to “egalitarian, gender-sensitive social- welfare protections at the transnational level” (Fraser, 2009:114). But who are these vulnerable people?

Vulnerability and Disadvantage

Following the CA one can define vulnerability as “the probability of falling into a lower state of well-being” (Dubois and Rousseau, 2008: 426). Thus vulnerability is a dynamic concept intimately connected to the concept of risk; a vulnerable person is a person at risk of seeing her standard of living worsened. According to Dubois and Rousseau, vulnerability is directly proportional to risk (as one increases so does the other) and it is inversely proportional to capabilities (as capability increases, vulnerability decreases). In a nutshell, vulnerability is the possibility for an individual to experience a decline in well-being, which in turn lowers their capability to cope with additional shocks and risks.

Vulnerability can also be considered an anthropological characteristic of human nature (Fineman, 2008; Turner, 1993; Fraser and Honneth, 2003). Vulnerability is a common characteristic of every human, linked to the frailty of the body and our dependency on others to survive and flourish, particularly in some stages of our lives such as childhood and old age, among others. Despite being universal, at least in potentiality since it affects every human at some point in their lives, vulnerability is manifested in different degrees, partly depending on individual characteristics but mostly on the availability and quality of the social institutions created to mitigate or decrease its different repercussions. In fact, the creation of social institutions seems to respond to our social condition, our dependency on others (Nussbaum, 2003 and 2006), our moral sympathy, rooted in our ability to empathise, to feel other people’s pain, together with the social precariousness, that is, the changes and instabilities that we endure during our lives (Turner, 1993).

Consequently, vulnerability should not be used as a disempowering term that victimises some individuals, undermining their agency and autonomy. If we accept the universal potential of vulnerability and our dependency on others, autonomy is always relational, as some feminist thinkers defend (Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000). Both vulnerability and agency are compatible, they do not preclude each other, however they are mutually affected. They are both dynamic and transitional concepts that evolve in interaction with others and are shaped by the existence and quality of social institutions. Thus, the negative repercussions of high levels of vulnerability should not be ascribed to specific individual characteristics, but to the failure of social institutions to mitigate these potential shortcomings, whilst enhancing the opportunity structure or capability set of the individual that would enable him or her to increase his or her agency and autonomy.

Increases and decreases in vulnerability are the result of a complex interaction of individual, social and environmental factors. Increases in vulnerability can create vicious cycles; vulnerable people tend to be disadvantaged in more than one dimension related to their capabilities. Likewise vulnerabilities are interconnected; “vulnerabilities may combine and compound their effects on well-being” (Barrientos, 2007: 15). Both capabilities and vulnerabilities of individuals “are deeply influenced by factors ranging from the prospects of earning a living, to the social and psychological effects of deprivation and exclusion. These include people’s basic needs, employment at reasonable wages and health and education facilities” (Moser, 1998: 3). One can think of a girl with a migration background whose unfair share of household responsibilities such as looking after elders or siblings may hinder her education and leisure capabilities (Nussbaum, 2000). This might be the result of structural racism that makes her immigrant parents vulnerable to an abusive labour market, in which they need to work unpredictable long hours for a low salary. The girl’s low school marks, consequence of the lack of time she should have dedicated to study instead of household chores, might be attributed to racial stereotypes that would lower teachers’ expectations of her. Her frustration at school might lead her to drop-out, which would hinder her future opportunities to get a reasonably well paid and secure job and result in a lower quality of life. In this example we can observe compounded disadvantages of age, gender, class and ethnicity resulting in capability deprivation, connecting social factors to individual biographies.

Rather than talking about vulnerability, which might be seen as a disempowering term with paternalistic connotations (Brown, 2014); one can follow Wolff and De-Shalit’s terminology and discuss “disadvantage”. According to them, “advantage has to be understood in a pluralist form” (2007:8). Their definition of disadvantage adds to the CA the notion of security, stability; since it is not only important to have a genuine freedom in a moment, but to be able to dispose of it in the future. Thus they define “disadvantage as a lack of genuine opportunity for secure functioning” (2007:9). Therefore risk and vulnerability are in themselves disadvantages.

Wolff and De Shalit’s analysis of disadvantage provides us with two useful concepts for our research. First, the term ‘corrosive disadvantages’, refers to those disadvantages which yield further disadvantages. Corrosive disadvantage can often be dynamic and inter-generational (Wolff and De-Shalit, 2007:121). Secondly, the contrary is the concept of ‘fertile functionings’ “i.e. those functionings the securing of which is likely to secure further functionings”. (2007:10).