ABSTRACT
Amartya Sen’s (1989) ‘capability approach’ has been influential in the development field, especially in broadening the understanding of development as necessarily involving a greater range of concerns than economic growth, as reflected in the crude measure of gross national product (GNP). Sen’s work falls into the arena of individual freedoms and functionings but also draws attention to the social structures and institutions that shape agency in given cultural contexts. Sen (1999: 53) acknowledged the importance of institutions for people’s freedoms when he argued in Development as Freedom that ‘there is a need to develop and support a plurality of institutions … [which can] incorporate private initiatives as well as public arrangements and also more mixed structures, such as nongovernmental organizations and cooperative entities’. Individual capabilities are effectively dependent on enabling social structures and this is part of the reason Sen (2004) rejected the idea of a definitive list of capabilities saying that they should be open to renegotiation within different social contexts and across different time periods.
