Collective political capabilities

ABSTRACT

Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-led Social Movements makes a significant contribution to contemporary capability theories by challenging their individualism. Mainline versions of the Capabilities Approach (CA), including those developed by Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and Ingrid Robeyns, insist on a methodological and normative individualism. And with good reason: communitarianism most often reinscribes patriarchal power, especially within the family. Deveaux, however, argues that this individualism yields a depoliticized account of poverty as capability deprivation, thereby downplaying or even denying the agency of the poor. But poor-led social movements politicize poverty, understanding it as a social and political relation between individuals and institutions. These movements build collective political capabilities: capabilities that can be exercised only by groups or that promote collective goods. The current paper explicates, extends, and defends this powerful challenge to mainline capability theories.

KEYWORDS:

• Deveaux, Monique
• capabilities approach
• poverty
• social movements
• left arts of government
• individualism
• agency
• Sen, Amartya

Introduction

The ‘grounded’ turn in political philosophy is one of the most exciting and important shifts in the discipline in a long time.¹ Yet it brings distinctive challenges. Going beyond empirical social science, the political philosopher needs to bring out how movement activity constitutes or supports a critique of philosophical systems currently on offer, and how it points towards ways that we should revise them or scrap them altogether; and she needs to do so for specifically normative concepts. In Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements,² Monique Deveaux does this expertly by building a critique, informed by activism, activist literature, and scholarly literature, of the mainline Capabilities Approach (CA) as developed most prominently by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen.

Deveaux builds on critics of this mainstream capabilities approach to suggest that, while this broad orientation is attractive, its mainline liberal expressions are unduly limited. Her critique characterizes it as suffering from two related failures: one of substance and one of orientation. On the level of substance, mainstream capability theorists are overly individualistic, emphasizing individual capabilities but ignoring collective and community capabilities that are both valuable in their own right and help secure individual capabilities. This is an important challenge because its individualism is one of the CA’s most important strengths as against both mainstream liberal economics, which has a hard time peering inside households to observe tyrannical relations within, and mainstream pluralistic politics, which has a hard time distinguishing between the interests of quasi-voluntary associations and those of their members. Collective capabilities need to be theorized in a way that does not hinder this signal virtue of the CA.

Relatedly, on the level of orientation, notwithstanding their direct focus on alleviating poverty and empowering the poor, mainline capability theories nonetheless maintain the all-too-common perspective of the policy advisor who seeks to influence elected officials and members of the executive or judicial branch. While there is great value in speaking to, and in the language of, these crucial nodes in any plausible power analysis, doing so risks missing or ignoring the voices of those struggling in the streets.

Underlying both challenges to the mainline CA are, I think, two deeper insights. One is that the methodology of mainline capability theorists fails to be ‘grounded’ in the way that characterizes the emerging methodology of ‘grounded normative theory’; instead, it is still philosophically derived, delivered more or less as a package from the theorist to the people. The second insight is that, despite capability theorists’ almost universal focus on conceptualizing and alleviating poverty, they depoliticize poverty. Mainstream capability theorists have no theory of the political. One of Deveaux’s most important insights in this book, grounded in her understanding of poor-led social movements, is the politicization of poverty.

Standard accounts of poverty define it either in terms of the absolute inability to afford a basket of basic necessities, or in terms of a person’s low income relative to that of the median worker (Nelson 2011). Capability theorists break from these conceptions by viewing poverty not in terms of resources but in terms of functionings or capabilities: what a person can be or do. For Sen (1998: chap. 4), poverty is thus not lack of income but socially caused or unalleviated ‘capability deprivation.’ Others have adopted a ‘hardship approach’ to measure poverty qualitatively in terms of the scope and degree of hardships that individuals and households face (See Nelson 2011, 20). Although these latter accounts are a big improvement on standard poverty-line measures, be they absolute or relative, Deveaux views them as still ‘depoliticized’ because they treat poverty as a condition that an individual finds themselves in. These approaches emphasize that policy can reduce or eliminate poverty, and sometimes provide very useful proposals for doing so. But they all downplay both the way policies and social structures create poverty in the first place, and the agency of those who are themselves poor in changing their own condition. A politicized account of poverty is relational: not in the sense that it sees poverty as ‘relative to’ the median income, but because it sees poverty as a relation between poor and non-poor people and between poor people and communities, on the one hand, and political systems, on the other. Deveaux therefore defines poverty as ‘subjection to social processes and relations of social exclusion, subordination, powerlessness, exploitation, dispossession, and destitution’ (11). It’s not about material lack, or even about the lack of capabilities to function. It’s a way of being caught up in a system of oppression.

My main purpose in this contribution is to explicate and assess Deveaux’s critique of the mainstream capabilities approach. I shall try to discern what value she adds by theorizing collective political capabilities (CPCs) as an addition to the CA’s toolbox, and whether, on balance, mainstream capability theories should take CPCs on board.

Mainstream CA: the case for individualism

The Capabilities approach combines accounts of the human good and human freedom – well-being and agency – to provide insight into the nature and measurement of poverty, as well as the core of a normative theory of justice.³ Capabilities are effective individual freedoms to realize valued functionings. For instance, literacy is a capability, and reading is the functioning associated with it. People have interests in having a wide range of capabilities so that they can function in the ways they value, whatever those are. Because being and doing what you value is intrinsically valuable, capabilities give us a more nuanced and more direct account of what it means to do well or badly, than do poverty lines and other resource-based accounts. Resource-based conceptions of welfare and poverty miss human diversity across a wide range of variables, including differential capacities to effectively use our resources for the functionings we value, whether because of individual constraints or social or natural ones, or a combination of these. Resource-based conceptions also make the error of substituting the means for the end.

This is an important framework, and Deveaux accepts it this far. However, building on arguments from critics such as Frances Stewart and Solava Ibrahim, as well as the theory and action of poor people’s movements, Deveaux rejects the individualism of mainstream capability theory. She argues that individualism makes the CA unduly conservative and generates incorrect answers about women’s empowerment and that of poor people in general.

And it is true that mainstream capability theorists embrace individualism. Sen, in particular, rejects the idea of collective or communal capabilities except as shorthand for ‘socially dependent individual capability,’ otherwise dismissing the category as a failure to use words ‘to mean what they are standardly taken to mean’ (Sen 2002, 85). This dismissal may seem odd, but it makes more sense when we bear in mind that appeals to what is good for collectives typically favour governments and patriarchs, which are the world’s greatest drivers of oppression, especially but not only of women. If some ‘collective’ capability truly makes individuals freer and better off, we might think, then it should also show up at the individual level. What Sen likely sees in a free-floating category of ‘collective capabilities’ is an attempt to reassert patriarchal prerogatives, and his dismissal challenges such accounts to avoid that perverse consequence.

Sen’s work on capabilities foregrounds women’s oppression as a site of analysis, and women’s empowerment as a mechanism for enhancing capability attainment for women and everyone else (Sen 1998: chaps. 8–9). Yet his methodology – more or less the standard toolbox of welfare economics and liberal political philosophy – abstracts from women’s agency per se. This may seem to be a major gap in his approach. Even if we reach this conclusion, however, it does not show that the mainstream CA as a whole suffers from this gap, since Nussbaum’s capability theory is no less mainstream and it has always foregrounded women’s agency, as fostered and realized in grassroots organizations. Nussbaum incorporates women’s perspectives into the aims and scope of her theory and uses them to test whether her list of ‘central human capabilities’ is adequate to its goals. Crucially, for Nussbaum, like Sen, capabilities are still a list of individual freedoms and aspects of individual well-being. The women’s organizations that have a role in fostering women’s capabilities are expressions or realizations of individual women’s capabilities but have no intrinsic value. That Nussbaum builds her normative capability theory in conversation with women and women’s organizations enhances the challenge for anyone who would add collective capabilities to the list. The challenge is double-edged: what necessity is unavailable to women when only individual capabilities are realized; and can these collective capabilities be added without reaffirming the power of organized patriarchy?

In an apparent contrast with Nussbaum and Sen, Ingrid Robeyns seems to accept a language of collective capabilities. Yet – apart from instances of deference to activist groups that are already using the term – she endorses this concept in only two narrow kinds of cases: (i) those for which we are dependent on groups of others as an instrument to attaining an individual (‘personal’) capability, and (ii) those that are realized in forms of life where individuals value participation with others. She insists, however, that these so-called collective capabilities remain ‘personal’ (or individual) capabilities, with the groups merely being causally related or partly constituting individual conceptions of the good (Robeyns 2017: sec. 3.6). What matters in the end, according to Robeyns, are still the individual functionings that these ‘collective’ capabilities promote. In short, what this survey shows is that Capability theorists have not simply blundered into individualism; it is a desired feature of the view.

Collective political capabilities

How, then, might we show not only that there are some irreducibly or basically collective capabilities, but that these capabilities are not retrograde?

Deveaux abjures the kinds of ‘collective capabilities’ that communitarians might propose, and which could hide patriarchy behind the walls of ‘a man’s castle.’ Instead, she develops what she calls ‘collective political capabilities’ (CPCs). She discerns two kinds of CPCs ‘that poor groups develop among their members’ (153). These are i) ‘the skills and capacities needed to engage in oppositional political activism and claim-making’ (153), and ii) ‘capabilities for cooperative and productive activity in an effort to gain access to resources and services that will increase the livelihoods, and sometimes the collective power, of their communities’ (153). She summarizes these as intertwined (i) strategic and (ii) livelihood-oriented CPCs (153).

As I read her, Deveaux thinks that CPCs require a departure from mainline capability theory because these CPCs are importantly basic, and not reducible to or reanalyzable in terms of individual functioning.⁴ First, strategic capabilities are basically collective because, here, the agent of the capabilities is collective, i.e., the capabilities are such that they are the capabilities of groups, rather than just personal capabilities for which we depend on others. When poor people’s movements organize, they become capable of actions that individuals cannot do and which are not well analysed into individual actions. For example, by organizing, groups develop epistemic and reasoning capabilities not only by ‘strengthening the individual human capabilities’ but by developing collective processes of knowing and engaging. These ‘left arts of government’ (166) are irreducibly collective skills that not only win change but consolidate it, hold back the ‘recuperative’ capacities of neoliberal institutions, and manifest the reality and sustainability of alternative modes of social organization. Robin Dunford, whom Deveaux cites in this context, explains how the left arts of government, for example,

foster the horizontal spread of movements, through the development of common identities, analyses and demands, and by forming organisational structures that enable peasant voices to be heard at a transnational level. (Dunford 2015, 1460)

Groups can do these things; individuals cannot. To try to reduce the ‘left arts of government’ to lists of individual actions would be pointless or precious. Such actions are necessarily built out of individual capabilities such as being able to communicate with one’s neighbours, but to insist that the left arts of government are just the sum of individual capacities would be obtuse.

If strategic CPCs are collective because they have an irreducibly collective agent, livelihood-oriented capabilities are basic because they realize irreducibly collective goods: goods that emerge from relationships or structures of interaction. As Deveaux puts it, poor-led social movements generate

intrinsic benefits, which include reduced isolation among poor individuals and families, greater security through savings cooperatives and other ventures, and a heightened sense of self-respect and political efficacy. (160)

Key for Deveaux here is the achievements of poor-led social movements, namely, that they realize CPCs. It would be sufficient for her case about the importance of such movements if – through their strategic CPCs – they realized any significant goods at all. But what can be said for the claim that some of the goods that they realize are also irreducibly collective? After all, Nussbaum’s list of central human capabilities includes reduced isolation and self-respect within capability #7 (Affiliation), and material security and political efficacy within #10 (control over one’s environment). Asset-pooling, for instance through building housing and toilets or organizing to compel the government to do so (177–88), powers individual capabilities.

Deveaux could respond that the goods thereby realized are not solely individual. If through hygiene and vaccination a community gains a critical mass of healthy individuals at all times, modes of community development and upward-spiralling benefits become possible even if individuals continue to become ill and even die of their illnesses at intervals. It is the low mortality rate that enables community development. The critical mass of good health is a collective functioning.

Some of these livelihood-oriented collective capabilities are also political and so count among the CPCs Deveaux theorizes. For instance, having a critical mass of (healthy, literate) activists who can attend meetings, create redundancies in communication networks, and come out in a show of force makes a difference to the efficacy of the group and its resilience through changes in personnel. These functionings in turn affect which decisions get made and how they have to be justified. Similarly, asset-pooling that enables a group to send delegates to worldwide conferences of poor-people’s movement organizations builds transnational political coalitions.

Although she does not include it in her list of CPCs, Deveaux’s analysis – and particularly her embrace of the ‘left arts of government’ – implies a third way for capabilities to be basically or irreducibly collective. If strategic CPCs have collective agents, and livelihood-oriented CPCs realize collective goods, then what we might call structural CPCs construct the background against which individual and collective agents act to realize individual and collective goods. Such backgrounds include official and unofficial rules as well as social norms. Deveaux emphasizes this structural power in her contrast between the economic empowerment that mainline capability theory emphasizes, and social-political empowerment as realized in CPCs:

[E]conomic empowerment … does not necessarily challenge underlying social relations of subordination; poor women can meet the benchmarks for economic empowerment … without any significant changes in their social disempowerment or political powerlessness. … [W]omen’s empowerment is “fundamentally about changing power relations”; this is very much “a process, not an endpoint, let alone a measurable outcome to which targets can be attached.” (158–9, quoting Cornwall and Rivas 2015, p. 405)

In these ways, Deveaux makes a compelling case for CPCs and against Sen’s dismissive individualism. As she concludes, ‘Women’s collective capabilities for social empowerment are thus irreducible to any of the individual capabilities, including individual economic empowerment’ (158–9).

Assessing the critique

How incisive is Deveaux’s argument, though, as a critique of mainstream capability theory? And how compelling is her argument for CPCs as a supplement?

Nussbaum could argue that her list is nothing more than a conception of human flourishing, in-principle severable from any account of the institutional frameworks in which it might be realized or the additional capabilities that might also characterize good lives in a given context. One would therefore not expect the activities of poor-led women’s organizations to be named items on Nussbaum’s list, except insofar as they express or realize capabilities such as practical reason, affiliation, and control over one’s environment. And although Deveaux disagrees, Nussbaum would argue that her account does ‘acknowledge … that poor social movements, including women’s grassroots groups, are critical for initiating a shift in critical consciousness and to motivate collective action that is socially and politically empowering’ (158). Nussbaum would insist that this is what Women and Human Development was all about.

Even if they granted Deveaux’s critique, mainstream capability theorists might worry whether theorizing the CPCs doesn’t take us down a problematic path. We might note that both Nussbaum and Deveaux develop their theories by reference to poor women’s groups in the Global South. But the same capabilities might be realized by, say, suburban NIMBYs in the Global North. For instance, the ability to prevent a below-market housing development from going into my neighbourhood is a capability that I don’t have, but my NIMBY does. It realizes goods, associated with having a more ‘desirable’ neighbourhood where a Whole Foods is more likely to open, which are irreducibly collective. And by getting the city to alter zoning codes so we don’t have to mobilize repeatedly to stop one developer after the next, we change the background against which our political game is played, rather than merely make moves within that political game. So, Nussbaum could argue, CPCs are morally valuable only when and because they subserve the universal attainment of the central human capabilities on her list and are either neutral or disvaluable otherwise. If that’s correct, then the mainstream capability theorist is not wrong to emphasize the individual central human capabilities, even if they admit that the CPCs can be useful adjuncts and instruments.

This two-pronged objection – the need for and the desirability of CPCs as supplements to the mainstream CA – seems to me to raise the most serious challenge to Deveaux’s account of CPCs. She might reply by returning to the relational conception of poverty. Poverty is not a personal economic condition but a political relationship. Similarly, environmental justice (EJ) and NIMBY are not descriptors for individual actions but for modes of affecting these political relationships. So Deveaux could agree that the NIMBY example shows people using CPCs for ill, yet argue that in order to be able to diagnose what’s wrong with NIMBYs and perceive how they differ from EJ movements, we need a relational and politicized conception of poverty that already supersedes what the mainline capability theorists can account for. An individualistic account of capabilities arguably can see no difference here. Both kinds of groups express political agency to realize well-being as they understand it. Both kinds of groups manifest Nussbaum’s capabilities #6, #7, and #10 in order to enhance #2, bodily health. Deveaux, however, can see the difference. What the NIMBYs do impoverishes others by cementing a relation of powerlessness, subordination, and exclusion; EJs are the exact opposite even when their methods and narrowly construed aims – ‘get these toxics out of our neighborhood!’ – are identical. Thus, the relational conception of poverty provides Deveaux with an answer to the two-pronged objection.

In developing this answer, it is important that Deveaux’s conception of poverty is not merely relational but politicized. This suggests a neo-republican account of the role of politics in the human good. Whereas liberals view politics as a specialized task, or collection of specialized tasks that are essential for democracy but may be no part of a good individual life, neo-republicans view doing politics as an essential part of a good life. If the CPCs are irreducible to the individual capabilities, then they are final values in their own right. Capabilities, or meta-capabilities, like ‘the capability for social and political empowerment and solidarity’ (160), are part of the best human life; what’s wrong with the NIMBYs is that even as they exercise this capability for themselves, they do so in a way that denies this and other political capabilities to others, thereby impoverishing them.

One reason that liberals reject politics as essential to the good life is that they think such a claim would be dangerously illiberal because it would not be neutral among conceptions of the good. Deveaux’s emphasis on the CPCs of poor-led social movements is a crucial rejoinder to this conception of liberal neutrality. In effect, ‘neutrality’ obscures power differentials and relational poverty. It imposes a sociology of individuals and associations but not social structures. A growing number of theorists, including most notably Iris Marion Young, have made this kind of case against liberalism. Deveaux’s work, to my mind, extends and deepens this argument by applying it to capability theories and by developing it with direct and detailed reference to poor-led social movements.

Conclusion

I have discussed only one thread of a book that is a rich tapestry. Yet this thread is of particular interest given the growing influence of the capabilities approach to political philosophy in general and its dominance within development ethics in particular. Deveaux’s book compellingly reveals some key limitations of mainline capability theories and develops important new pathways for capability theorists to pursue and voices for them to heed.

Which brings me to a final point. For political philosophers, our greatest insights are collective in the sense that we reach them in conversation with others. Philosophical progress is a collective capability. But for this reason, it matters a lot who is part of the conversation. By theorizing in a way that learns from and responds to the actions and grounded theorizing of poor-led social movements, Monique Deveaux shows that political philosophers, and capability theorists in particular, need to be engaging in different conversations with different actors, from those with whom we have spent most of our time before now.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and not those of the University of Louisville

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Peggy Kohn and the anonymous referees for feedback on a previous draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ I leave aside here the deeper methodological question of what counts specifically as ‘grounded normative theory’ and the ways in which Deveaux’s book does and does not fall under this heading. For valuable insight on that see Brooke Ackerly’s contribution to the current symposium.

² Deveaux (2021). Hereinafter, parenthetical page numbers will refer to this work.

³ It does the first thing in the hands of Sen (1998) and his followers and does the latter thing in the hands of Nussbaum (2000; Nussbaum 2008) and her followers. For an extremely valuable overview of the approach as a whole and many debates within it, see Robeyns (2017).

⁴ I mean ‘not reducible’ here only in the sense in which methodological individualism insists on the possibility of ‘reducing’ all collective properties to sums and interactions of individual properties. I do not believe that Deveaux depends on, and I certainly do not assume, any particular account of collective properties.