Creating Capabilities

The Human Development Approach

Martha C. Nussbaum

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674252783
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

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. It demonstrates a path to justice for both humans and nonhumans, weighs its relevance against other philosophical stances, and reveals the value of its universal guidelines even as it acknowledges cultural difference. In our era of unjustifiable inequity, Nussbaum shows how—by attending to the narratives of individuals and grasping the daily impact of policy—we can enable people everywhere to live full and creative lives.

I

A WOMAN SEEKING JUSTICE

All over the world people are struggling for lives that are worthy of their human dignity. Leaders of countries often focus on national economic growth alone, but their people, meanwhile, are striving for something different: meaningful lives for themselves. Increased GDP has not always made a difference to the quality of people’s lives, and reports of national prosperity are not likely to console those whose existence is marked by inequality and deprivation. Such people need theoretical approaches that can aid their struggles, or at least provoke public debate by drawing attention to them; they do not need approaches that keep these struggles hidden or muffle discussion and criticism. As the late Mahbub ul Haq, the Pakistani economist who inaugurated the Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme, wrote in the first of those reports, in 1990: “The real wealth of a nation is its people. And the purpose of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy, and creative lives. This simple but powerful truth is too often forgotten in the pursuit of material and financial wealth.” According to Haq, development economics needs a new theoretical approach if it is to respond to people’s most urgent problems.

Consider Vasanti, a small woman in her early thirties who lives in Ahmedabad, a large city in the state of Gujarat, in northwestern India. Vasanti’s husband was a gambler and an alcoholic. He used the household money to get drunk. When that money was gone, he got a vasectomy to take advantage of the cash incentive that Gujarat’s government offered to encourage sterilization. So Vasanti had no children to help her, a huge liability, given the fact that a childless woman is more vulnerable to domestic violence. Eventually, as her husband became more abusive, she left him and returned to her own family.

Poor parents (or siblings, if the parents have died) are often unwilling to take back a child who has been married, especially a female child who took a dowry with her. Accepting the child back into the home means another mouth to feed and a new set of anxieties. In Vasanti’s case, a divorce would prove costly because her husband was unwilling to grant one. It was her good fortune, then, that her family was willing to help her. Many women in her position end up on the street, with no alternative but sex work. Vasanti’s father, who used to make Singer sewing machine parts, had died, but her brothers were running an auto parts business in what was once his shop. Using one of his old machines, and living in the shop itself, Vasanti earned a small income making eyeholes for the hooks on sari tops. Meanwhile, her brothers gave her a loan to get another machine, one that rolls the edges of the sari. She took the money, but she didn’t like being dependent on her siblings—they were married and had children, and their support could end at any time.

Vasanti then discovered the Self-Employed Women’s Organization (SEWA), a pathbreaking nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Ahmedabad that works with poor women. Founded by the internationally acclaimed activist Ela Bhatt, SEWA had by that time helped more than 50,000 members, with programs including microcredit, education, health care, and a labor union. Unlike some other Indian states, Gujarat has followed a growth-oriented agenda without devoting many resources to the needs of its poorest inhabitants. Government programs that might have helped Vasanti—legal aid, health care, credit, education—were not to be found. It was her good luck that one of the best NGOs in India happened to be in her own backyard.

With the help of SEWA, Vasanti got a bank loan of her own and paid back her brothers. (SEWA, which began as a humble credit union, now operates a bank in an impressive office building in downtown Ahmedabad. All the officers and employees of the bank are women, many of them former beneficiaries of SEWA’s programs.) By the time I met her, several years later, she had paid back almost all the SEWA loan itself. She was also eligible to enroll in SEWA’s educational programs, where she was planning to learn to read and write and to acquire the skills necessary to promote greater social and economic independence and political participation. With the help of her friend Kokila, she was actively involved in combating domestic violence in her community. This friendship would have been very unlikely but for SEWA; Vasanti, though poor, is from the high Brahmin caste, and Kokila is from one of the lower castes. Though still all too evident in society in general, divisions along lines of caste and religion are anathema in the Indian women’s movement.

What theoretical approach could direct attention to the most significant features of Vasanti’s situation, promote an adequate analysis of it, and make pertinent recommendations for action? Suppose for a moment that we were interested not in economic or political theory but just in people: what would we notice and consider salient about Vasanti’s story?

First we would probably notice how small Vasanti is, and we could initially take this as evidence of poor nutrition in childhood. Poor families are often forced to feed all their children poorly, but we would want to ask about how her brothers fared. Evidence abounds that girls are less well nourished than boys and less often taken to the doctor in childhood when ill. Why? Because girls have fewer employment opportunities than boys and thus seem less important to the well-being of the entire family. The work they do in the home does not bring in money, so it is easy to overlook its economic importance. Moreover, in northern and western India girls move away from the family when they marry, taking a dowry with them. They are thus more expensive than boys, and parents often wonder why they should spend their resources on girls who won’t be around to support them in their old age. The mortality of second daughters in northern and western India is notoriously high. So Vasanti’s nutritional deficiency is a result not just of poverty but also of gender discrimination.

Unequal laws of property and inheritance contribute to the predicament of India’s daughters, and anyone thinking about Vasanti’s life must consider the role they have played in her situation. The religion-based systems of personal law that have existed in India since Independence govern property and inheritance as well as family law. All the systems institutionalize large inequalities for women. Until 1986, for example, Christian women inherited only one-fourth of what sons inherited, a custom that surely contributes to defining the worth of a daughter’s life as less than that of a son’s. Hindu women, too, have suffered inequalities under the Hindu property code; they attained equal shares in agricultural land only in 2005, seven years after I met Vasanti. Hers is not a land-owning family, but an analysis of her predicament would naturally lead us to notice that closely related inequity.

Thinking about such issues, we would be led to a study of the striking gender imbalance in India’s population. Demographers estimate that where similar nutrition and health care are present, women live, on average, slightly longer than men—so we would expect a ratio of something like 102 women to 100 men. Instead, the most recent Indian census shows 92 women to 100 men. These numbers are averages. In the south, where property is transmitted through the maternal line, and where the husband moves into his bride’s home rather than taking his bride away, women’s basic life expectancy corresponds to the demographers’ prediction: the state of Kerala has a sex ratio of 102 women to 100 men. In some northern states, by contrast, the ratio is alarmingly out of kilter: a house-to-house survey in one area of rural Bihar came up with the astounding figure of 75 women to 100 men. It’s well known that these imbalances are augmented wherever information about the sex of the fetus is available. Amniocentesis clinics are ubiquitous throughout the nation. Because sex-selective abortion is such a widespread problem in India, it is illegal to seek information about the sex of the fetus, but these laws are rarely enforced.

Vasanti, then, has had a bit of good luck in being alive at all. Her family didn’t nourish her very well, but they did better than many poor families. When I met her she seemed to be in reasonable health, and she is fortunate to have a strong constitution, since health care is not easily accessible to the poor in Gujarat. The Indian Constitution makes health a state rather than a federal issue, so there is great variation in the resources available to the poor state by state. Some Indian states, for example, Kerala, have effective health care systems, but most do not.

Next, we are likely to notice the fact that a woman as intelligent and determined as Vasanti has had few employment options because she never learned to read and write. We can put this down to a failure in the Gujarati education system, since education, like health, is a state matter, and literacy rates vary greatly from state to state. In Kerala, adolescent literacy for both boys and girls is close to 100 percent, whereas nationally 75.3 percent of men are literate compared with only 53.7 percent of women. The factors that produce this discrepancy are related to those that produce the sex gap in basic life expectancy and health: women are thought to have fewer options in employment and politics, so from the family’s perspective, it makes more sense to assign domestic labor to girls while sending boys to school. The prophecy is self-fulfilling, since illiteracy debars women from most employment and many political opportunities. Moreover, the fact that a girl will soon leave her birth family and join another family through marriage gives her parents a lesser stake in her future. Kerala has addressed these problems better than Gujarat, though Kerala has a poor record of creating employment opportunities for people once they are educated.

Because education is such a crucial avenue of opportunity, the Indian Constitution was amended in 2002 to give both primary and secondary education the status of an enforceable fundamental right. Recognizing that poor parents often keep children out of school because they need their labor to survive, the Supreme Court of India has ordered all schools to offer children a nutritious midday meal that contains at least 350 calories and 18 grams of protein, thus giving poor parents an economic incentive that often outweighs the lost wages from their child’s labor during school hours. Vasanti missed this change, which might have made her both literate and physically bigger.

Meanwhile, at the national level, the Constitution was amended in 1992 to assign women one-third of the seats in local panchayats, or village councils. This system, like the midday meal, provides incentives for parents to educate daughters as well as sons, since one day they may well represent the interests of the family in local government. Again, this change came too late for Vasanti, in the sense that it didn’t influence her parents’ educational choices for the family. Now, however, Vasanti may utilize the adult education programs offered by SEWA to enhance her participation in both politics and employment.

Because Vasanti has had no formal education, she is cut off from a full understanding of her nation’s history and its political and economic structure. (She can get news from TV and from her friends, but she is still limited in her ability to access a more comprehensive account or to pursue issues that interest her.) She is also unable to enjoy poetry, novels, or the many works of the imagination that would make her life richer and more fun. She is not, however, cut off from music and dance, and SEWA makes valuable use of these media in educating women like Vasanti.

A key issue in Vasanti’s story is domestic violence. That complex story, in turn, involves social and governmental choices in many areas. Her husband’s alcoholism clearly fueled his violence. Several Indian states have adopted prohibition laws for this very reason. This hasn’t proved to be a very effective remedy: more helpful would have been educational programs about alcohol and drugs and high-quality treatment and therapy, none of which were provided by state government to Gujarat’s poor population. By contrast, it was state action rather than inaction that explains her husband’s vasectomy: bribing poor people to have vasectomies is not a great means of population control for many reasons, not the least of which is that it robs women of choice. As for the violence itself, Vasanti received no help from the police, a consequence of weak law enforcement and bad police training. So her bodily integrity and health were constantly at risk, and her dignity was violated.

When we think about domestic violence we have to think about exit options and bargaining power in the marriage. When a woman can leave, she doesn’t have to endure being beaten. And when the husband knows she can leave because she has employment opportunities or control over property, she is at least somewhat less likely to be beaten. Important research by Bina Agarwal shows that landownership is the single most important factor explaining why some women in a region suffer domestic abuse and others don’t. A woman who owns land is less likely to be victimized because she can leave the marriage, and when she leaves she will be taking something of great value with her. Other sources of leverage against an abusive husband are employment, education, movable property, and savings. A compassionate birth family also offers exit options. Vasanti’s family was unusual in that they gave her the option to leave her husband with dignity, and even to take up employment. Nonetheless, the difficulty of getting a divorce—the legal system is slow and notoriously corrupt—made it hard for her to stand fully on her own.

The SEWA loan changed that picture. The organization gave Vasanti a source of support not tied to her status as a dependent; the money was hers to use even if she displeased her brothers. This independence enhanced her self-respect and capacity for choice.

The toll that domestic violence takes on physical health is enormous, but its effect on emotional health is equally devastating. Women in Vasanti’s position usually suffer greatly from both fear and the inhibition of anger. They often lack any true pleasure in love and sexual expression. The conditions that made it possible for Vasanti to leave her husband also improved her emotional health, as did her good relationship with her brothers. The SEWA loan opened still more doors to happiness: Vasanti clearly enjoys her friendship with Kokila and the experience of being respected and treated as an equal within a group of women.

During her marriage, Vasanti was cut off from all relationships except the highly unequal one with her abusive husband. She did not have friends, she was unable to work, she did not participate in politics. This is the lot of many women in abusive relationships, but it is particularly common for women whose caste status makes it shameful for them to seek employment outside the home. Uppercaste women like Vasanti are often worse off than lower-caste women, who can circulate freely. Vasanti was even prevented from having children, which would have provided her with a source of love. SEWA made it possible for her to become active in politics and to form a whole group of friends who respect her as an equal. The fact that she came to the SEWA office to tell her story to a stranger was itself a sign of new openness and curiosity. She seemed excited and proud to talk about her life. Nonetheless, the workplace options open to her as a Brahmin woman remain highly circumscribed, and her participation in political life is still limited by her inability to read and write.

Vasanti is active in one area of politics, as she and Kokila work to diminish domestic violence. We might ask, though, whether she knows her rights as a citizen, whether she is a voter, whether she knows anything about how to use the legal system. The panchayat system has done a great deal to enhance women’s political engagement and knowledge, and India’s poor in general have an extremely high level of participation in elections, so she probably has at least some understanding of the political system. In the absence of literacy and formal schooling, however, her ability to inform herself further is limited. Studies of the panchayats have shown that illiterate women have a hard time participating in public affairs and gaining respect.

SEWA focuses on a very basic theme that runs through all these issues: the ability of women to control and plan their own lives. SEWA teaches women that they are not merely passive, not objects to be pushed around by others or mere pawns or servants of others: they can make choices, they can plan their futures. This is a heady new idea for women brought up to think of themselves as dependents with no autonomy. In Vasanti’s case, choice and independence were, indeed, the main difference between the SEWA loan and the loan from her brothers. The pleasure in this newfound status as a decision-maker seemed to pervade her relationship with Kokila (a chosen friend, and perhaps her first chosen friend) as well as her dealings with the women’s group.

What else might we notice? We don’t know much about Vasanti’s working hours or the structure of her day. Does she have any time for leisure? Can she ever just sit and think, or enjoy something beautiful, or drink tea with her friends? She seems to take pleasure in dressing well. Her sari is a lovely color of bright blue; like most poor women in India, she does not allow poverty to restrict her aesthetic imagination. She can most likely enjoy play and leisure activity to some degree, not because her society has protected leisure time for all citizens, but because she has no children and no responsibilities for in-laws. The flip side of her sad story is that at least she is not stuck with the “double day” of a demanding job plus full responsibility for domestic labor and child and elder care, as are millions of women all over the world. In general, protecting leisure time for workers, especially female workers, is an important issue in creating a decent society.

In thinking about play and fun, I wondered if Vasanti was interested in meeting some nice men and perhaps marrying again, once her divorce was final. One of the most striking aspects of the Indian women’s movement has been the virtual absence of Western romantic notions. Women who have endured an unhappy marriage rarely express interest in seeking another spouse. They want to be able to live without a man, and they love the fact that one of SEWA’s central ideals is the Gandhian notion of self-sufficiency. The thought is that, just as India could not win self-respect and freedom without achieving self-sufficiency with regard to its colonial master, so women cannot have self-respect and freedom without extricating themselves from dependence on their colonial masters, namely, men. Women view their ability to live without a man as a sign of self-respect. We might wonder whether such women (who are often homophobic and thus unlikely to be involved in lesbian relationships) are deprived of one of life’s great pleasures. Do they really choose to live as single women, or are they too emotionally traumatized or exhausted by malnutrition to seek out a partner? When they talk of Western notions of romance and express a preference for solidarity with a group of women, however, we are reminded that one way of life (in this case, as part of a romantic couple...