Creating Capabilities

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.

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.

In this 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.

Digital convergence is redefining industries, and putting information, knowledge and collaboration at the heart of strategic leadership and management. In the face of such change it is those leaders who can ‘orchestrate’ a complex network of employees, customers and suppliers in a single ongoing learning experience that will succeed. Exploring four learning roles for customers (information acquirer; explorer; performer; inventor) and orchestrators (conductor; architect; auctioneer; promoter), Business Orchestration provides a strategic view of how to harness digital convergence by mobilizing and integrating the resources of other companies to create business value.

Martha Nussbaum proposes a kind of feminism that is genuinely international.

This book reframes gender and education issues from a feminist and capabilities perspective through a multi-generational study of women as teachers. It explores how different understandings of gender, equality and education generate a variety of approaches with which to pursue gender equality in education. Through employing the capabilities approach in a critical and innovative way to question justice, agency and well-being and also to evaluate valued functionings and capabilities, freedoms and lack of opportunities in women’s lives in Turkey it highlights the need for constructing a gender-just society. The book takes a closer look at these women’s memories, in order to understand how gender roles were created, negotiated and contested, and how the transition to modern ways of socialising and existing was shaped and women’s emancipation was guided by women teachers as social actors, rather than as passive onlookers or oppressed individuals. It provides important insights and critical evidence to be used in the planning and implementation of education and social/gender policies.

This is the first book dedicated exclusively to the question of the relationships between sustainability and the capability approach. It is rather astonishing that the issue of sustainability first posed by the Brundtland commission in 1987 has gained so little attention from capability scholars despite the approach’s focus on human well-being. This book starts with a seminal contribution by Sen on the "Ends and Means of Sustainability" delivered as a keynote in 2000. All contributions to the book focus on the difficulties that arise from a freedom-oriented view of sustainability: they argue for taking note of the impact of human life on nature, they question the meaning of intergenerational justice when measured in the currency of "substantive freedoms" (capabilities), they raise the issue of collective responsibility and suggest ways to model and operationalize the capability approach to sustainable development. The book presents the state of the art concerning "The capability approach and sustainability" while admitting that it is only a first contribution to a growing field that deserves our attention: Defining what is to be sustained and asking how it can be sustained. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities.

Provides unique reflections on the capability approach and its relevance to new human development policies and political liberalism.