Sustainability, Capabilities and Human Security

Andrew Crabtree

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030389048
• eBook ISBN: 9783030389055
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have made major contributions to development studies and social philosophy, yet sustainability issues have largely remained outside their domain despite sustainability's significance and complex relation to their central value of freedom. This volume explores sustainability from a capabilities perspective, with the motif of human security, inviting a lively discussion within the human development family. After introducing the two approaches, authors conceptualize relationships between capabilities and the environment, examine the scientific and normative validity of environmental indicators and analyse intergenerational justice. Climate change is used to exemplify that a human security approach can add an explanatory ontology to the ethical criticisms of contemporary ways of life that champion consumerism. That ontology recognizes shared life experiences, problems and life challenges - a community of fate. The volume ends with a discussion of how the approaches can inform and sometimes critique the Sustainable Development Goals.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. Crabtree (ed.)Sustainability, Capabilities and Human Securityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38905-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Capabilities, Human Security and the Centrality of Sustainability

Andrew Crabtree¹

(1)

Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

Andrew Crabtree

Email: [email protected]

I would like to thank Des Gasper for his insightful and thoughtful comments and suggestions.

End Abstract

1.1 Introduction

Almost 50 years after the United Nations Conference on the 1972 Human Environment in Stockholm and more than 30 years after the publication of Our Common Future, the capability approach, led by the Nobel Prize winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, has paid relatively little attention to issues concerning sustainable development. As recently as 2013, Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze criticised India’s record on growth for not delivering on health and education whilst other comparable countries including some with lower growth rates have done better in terms of education and health. The authors maintain rapid growth is still desirable for India, but growth’s relationship to the environment receives scant attention even though, for example, India is the third largest greenhouse gas emitter. Their book devotes just over four pages out of over 400 to environmental issues and sustainability. In 2011, the political philosopher Martha Nussbaum stated “Getting clear about how to count the interests of subsequent generations of humans is of the highest importance for future work if the approach is to be a serious player in the environmental arena” (Nussbaum 2011, p. 164). In her Preface to the 2019 Journal of Human Development and Capabilities’ special issue in celebration of Amartya Sen’s 85th birthday, Nussbaum laments the lack of attention paid to environmental issues and the rights of non-human animals (Nussbaum 2019). However, these leading authors have primarily concerned themselves with development and intragenerational justice rather than sustainable development and intergenerational justice. This book addresses these gaps.¹

The present chapter begins by outlining Sen and Nussbaum’s work and indicates how taking sustainability on board would make substantial differences to their overlapping approaches. It then moves on to introduce the sister concept of human security and its attractions. The constituent chapters of the book are then outlined.

Two major themes run through the book. Firstly, the non-human environment is essential for human well-being and its role in relation to capabilities or human security needs articulating and specifying. A concentration on capabilities and our doings and beings (more technically “functionings”—see below) alone, which is the tendency in the literature, leads us to ignore these relationships and does not enable us to answer the question of whether human development is sustainable or not. Secondly, we must understand the capability approach in a dynamic way. Life does not end in doings and beings, functionings themselves have consequences for other people and for the environment. This includes future generations and the importance of intergenerational justice.

1.2 Sen, Nussbaum and Sustainability

Why have Sen and Nussbaum given sustainability issues relatively so little attention? Although their works overlap, Sen and Nussbaum’s interests have different origins. Sen described in his Nobel Biographical statement two childhood experiences which have deeply influenced his work. The one was witnessing the stabbing of a Muslim day labourer, who later died, by Hindu thugs during the communal killings in mid-1940s India. In contrast to this unreason, Sen has always argued for tolerance, pluralism, openness, reasoning, deliberation and the importance of democracy both in his work on development and that on justice. The other experience was the 1943–1945 Bengal Famine in which two to three million people died and yet which hardly affected those Sen knew. This experience has manifested itself in his concern with the basics—poverty, famines, longevity, education, families—and is also reflected in the Human Development Index to which he made a major contribution. Add to this his work on social welfare theory and social choice and we have a huge body of work that deals with pressing issues.

Martha Nussbaum’s opus is also very broad. Her background lies in political philosophy, Greek and Roman philosophy and literature and the importance of the emotions to philosophy and justice. Here, her thought is also strongly influenced by the work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and object-relations theory. Her work within the capabilities approach has concerned basic social justice, for which she has defined a set of ten central capabilities which each individual should—as near as possible—possess (see below). Rectifying such lacks, she maintains, is the task of governments and policy. She has made substantial contributions to gender theory and animal rights. Neither author would claim that they have solved all the issues in their respective areas and given their astonishing breadth of work, should we expect Sen or Nussbaum to have made substantial contributions to issues surrounding sustainability too? But then those issues must be taken up by others inspired by Sen and Nussbaum.

This volume seeks, in part, to amplify the capability approach but in doing so the authors ask vital questions about Sen and Nussbaum’s work. For example, Sen’s recommendation of rapid growth for India is short-termism if the greenhouse gas emissions associated with growth will lead to substantial capability loss in the not too distant future. At least, the type of growth matters. Similarly, it is not automatic that meeting the threshold requirements of Nussbaum’s basic social justice, including “being able to move freely from place to place”, is compatible with necessary reductions in our greenhouse gas emissions. Sustainability is not just an “add on”. It is fundamental. This introduction therefore both situates the book’s chapters in the context of Sen and Nussbaum’s overlapping, yet contrasting, approaches, and points to other important work that is being done within the fields of human development and of human security.

The main terms used within the capability approach are somewhat problematic. As Sen has pointed out ‘capability’ is “not an awfully attractive word”, that possibly reminds us of nuclear warfare rather than human well-being (Sen 1993). It was chosen to designate the substantive freedoms that individuals have to achieve various functionings.² ‘Functionings’ is another perhaps unhappy term which covers our ‘doings and beings’. But the word might sometimes evoke the workings of machinery rather than the human agency and choice that are at the heart of the approach. One might be tempted to use the word ‘flourishing’ instead of functioning but flourishing is positive, while not all doings and beings are.

Given the prolific quantity and variety of both Sen and Nussbaum’s writings, it is not surprising that the approach has attracted a multidisciplinary audience and, related to this, there is no agreed definition of the capability approach. In Creating Capabilities, Nussbaum defines it as “an approach to comparative quality-of-life assessment and to theorizing about basic social justice” (Nussbaum 2011, p. 18). The definition captures important parts of both Sen and Nussbaum’s work and of those working within the capability approach. Yet, as Robeyns (2017) argues, the definition leaves out various strands of work within the capability approach. Sen for example has also examined the efficiency of markets in capability terms and others have looked for conceptual clarification via the capability approach. As Robeyns points out, Nussbaum’s definition does not capture how the approach is being used conceptually to elucidate various concepts. She points to the case of education and the important work that is being done on understanding what kind of education is needed for people to flourish rather than just gain skills for the labour market.

The capability approach has also clarified itself in terms of what it is not, by its contrasts to other approaches, most notably those which are based on resources and those which concentrate on end-states. Income and growth approaches to development and some aspects of Rawls’ theory of justice belong to the first group, while classical utilitarianism can be considered part of the second. Diagrammatically, if somewhat simplistically, we can present these contrasts through a flow-diagram (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

A schematic version of the capability approach. (Source own)

Within the field of development, the central attention has been on economic growth and income as measures of development and not just means of development. Sen’s argument against this has been that different people need different resources to have the same capabilities or freedoms and thus defining absolute poverty in terms of dollars, at present $1.90 per day, as the World Bank does, fails to capture the fact that different people need different amounts of money in order to achieve the same things. Between the resource and the capability there are various ‘conversion factors’ which affect a person’s freedom to do are be something. Sen’s famous example being that an able-bodied person and a person in a wheelchair need different resources (wheelchairs, ramps, elevators etc.) to be able to move around. Indeed, someone may well be earning more than $1.90 a day but be less able to get around than someone living on less than $1.90 a day. To offer another example, someone living in Greenland might need greater greenhouse gas emissions than someone living in Iceland, where thermal energy is available, to have the capability to be warm. For the capability approach, it is actually what you are or not able to do that counts rather than resources.

The examples above do not provide a knock out argument as in theory someone supporting a resource-based view of development could factor in the amounts of money needed to pay for all the additional requirements to ensure equal mobility or warmth. However, other conversion factors, such as people’s attitudes or cultural norms or institutional set ups, cannot be monetarized. Individual’s freedoms may be curtailed by laws or mores preventing women from driving cars or blacks from voting under apartheid regimes. In such cases the lack of freedom cannot be made up for by increasing a person’s income. Socio-cultural changes are required if people are to have the same freedoms. This does not mean that resources are unimportant, rather they are seen as instrumental for having capabilities or achieving functionings.

If we only judge people’s well-being in terms of their achieved functionings, we again miss important information. Robeyns (2005) provides example of a boxer and a beaten housewife both may have the same achieved functionings, i.e. being battered, but have a very different set of choices. Thus, Sen argues, the freedom to achieve various functionings is the most important space for welfare comparison. Obviously, in some cases we may simply examine functionings, such as during famines, as we can safely assume that people are not on hunger strike. Thus, agency is central here for some people can choose to have a lower well-being in the sense that a person on hunger strike’s well-being in nutritional terms may be deliberately lower, indeed they may die, than they otherwise could be as a result of their own agency. For Sen then, capabilities or freedoms are the relevant evaluative space and therefore development is defined in terms...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Capabilities, Human Security and the Centrality of Sustainability
• 2. Human Development and Strong Sustainability: A Mutual Dialogue
• 3. Sustainability Indicators, Ethics and Legitimate Freedoms
• 4. Sustaining Human Well-Being Across Time and Space—Sustainable Development, Justice and the Capability Approach
• 5. Where Are Criteria of Human Significance in Climate Change Assessment?
• 6. Human Development Thinking About Climate Change Requires a Human Rights Agenda and an Ontology of Shared Human Security
• 7. Conclusion: The Sustainable Development Goals and Capability and Human Security Analysis
• Back Matter