It’s about Process: Who Draws up the List of Capabilities and How?

ABSTRACT

I agree with the focus article that, in theory, ‘capabilities’ represent the most ethically appropriate informational space for evaluating housing outcomes. My concerns with the article are twofold. First, it overestimates the practical utility of the capabilities approach for qualitative and quantitative housing research. Second, it leaves unanswered the more pressing and pertinent procedural question of “who decides on the list of capabilities and how?”. In line with Sen, I argue that the list of capabilities (or any alternative framework for evaluating housing outcomes) should be determined from the bottom-up through a process of deliberative democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• capabilites
• deliberative democracy
• normative
• values

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I think the authors could have done more to justify and make explicit their choice of Sen over Nussbaum -at one point they describe a study using Nussbaum’s approach (Nicholls 2010) without discussing its limitations.

2. In support of Sen’s adaptive preferences critique (p.8), the authors cite an observation made in Clapham, Foye, and Christian (2018) that the of home-ownership on subjective well-being is mediated by financial security. This is true but I don’t see how it relates to adaptation – Nakazato, Schimmack, and Oishi (2011) is probably a better example.

3. https://blog.shelter.org.uk/2018/08/what-the-introduction-of-estate-regeneration-ballots-will-mean-for-london/.