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Abstract
The article reviews the role of capability innovations, defined as the carrying out of new combinations of capabilities, in human development. Drawing on a recognized social innovation in sanitation—the ikotoilets of Kenya's Ecotact—the article makes a threefold argument. Firstly, indirect conversion factors are an important element in the success or failure of an innovation. In our sanitation case study, these factors help to explain why the public toilets in urban centres are a success story and those in the slums a story of difficulty. Secondly, not to take into account direct and indirect conversion factors is to commit explanatory commodity fetishism. Goods are taken as given. However, they are the product of human design, including options for capability impact, and this accordingly needs to be taken into account. Thirdly, applying the capabilities approach to innovation suggests that it is fruitful to distinguish analytically two different scaling strategies regarding the replication of capability innovations, which the article calls ‘the lab’ and ‘the family’ strategies.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the opportunity to present earlier versions of this article at the AG Umweltethik of the University of Greifswald and at the 2011 Conference of the HDCA, ‘Innovation, Development & Human Capabilities’. The research of all contributing authors has been financed by the FONA programme of the German Ministry of Education and Research.
Notes
The distinction of the developing and the developed world is still widely used. We realize that from a human development perspective this distinction as it is usually drawn, with a focus on income or GDP levels, is highly problematic. From a philosophical perspective, development as the expansion of capabilities is an issue for income-rich and income-poor countries alike.
According to the same report, 56% of the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa does not have access to improved sanitation facilities. The Kenyan government estimates that 19% of the population (5.7 million people) do not have access to adequate sanitation (Ministry of Water and Irrigation, Citation2006).
Numbers based on personal communication with Ecotact, 29 July 2011.
Classic entrepreneurship theory distinguishes between the entrepreneur as innovator and the administrator as having the managerial task of efficiently and effectively organizing an enterprise.
As makes clear, this is one possible pathway for human development. Also, as is well known from entrepreneurship research, many and effectively most ideas will not be scaled.
See www.ecotact.org (accessed 22 July 2011).
The formulation of capabilities follows Martha Nussbaum's list of basic capabilities (Nussbaum, Citation2006).
See [www.ecotact.org] (accessed 22 July 2011).
This is due to the sorry state of public toilets prior to the rehabilitation, but is likely also linked to much longer traditions of dealing with sanitation in rural Kenyan societies.
Arjun Appadurai coined the expression ‘capacity to aspire’ to highlight, among other things, that the poor are expected to subscribe to norms whose social effect is to diminish their dignity (Appadurai, Citation2004, p. 66). One example is the expectation of what counts as appropriate access to sanitation for the poor. Now the very idea of a toilet monument, i.e. a building which people in the street tend to associate or even confuse with a bank or a hotel, subverts such an expectation. In a survey in one marketplace with such a monument, we found that the number of users initially dropped in comparison to the prior public toilet. The old public toilet was run down; the new monument even has regularly cleaned tiles. Might such tiles be an initial obstacle for some people to (dare to) use the toilet? After a few months, the number of ikotoilet users (especially female) had increased in comparison to the old toilet and in spite of the charge (Dietsche et al., Citation2012). As we will see below in the discussion of Ecotact as a catalyst, the monuments might act as a trigger for what to aspire to in terms of sanitation but also in terms of municipal politics more generally.
Each ikotoilet employs cleaners who repeatedly clean during operating hours.
John Karioki, Deputy Director of Environmental Health at the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation, and also involved in the sanitation strategy of the country, says that he and colleagues from other East African countries have a ‘big argument’ here with the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) methodology because it does not sufficiently recognize the importance of public toilets (interview conducted on 8 February 2011).
According to Ecotact, 38 out of 40 functional ikotoilets have rooms for the disabled, i.e. all ikotoilets except those in schools. Initially these had been separate rooms, but there was a change in design. The rooms for disabled users are now located with the other rooms so as to improve access to toilets for the general public when there is no use by a disabled person.
For a discussion of the business model see Hussain Citation(2010).
For example, there also seems to be an indirect impact on political participation. If citizens see and experience the possibility of safe, clean and affordable public toilets, they may also come to demand such toilets. In Nanyuki town, people staged a demonstration when an ikotoilet was closed down by the municipality, and the ikotoilet was eventually reopened. Some municipalities have actively invited Ecotact to open toilets.
For reasons of space we do not address here the ecological sustainability aspect of the ikotoilets. For the same reason, we also primarily focus on the capability impact at the level of the user. However, we note that a more comprehensive analysis would take the entire value chain into account.
Users with disabilities are not charged. As for other users, a comparison of charges for toilet use in all public toilets in central Nairobi (February 2011), both public and private, shows 5 Ksh to be the standard charge with only one toilet charging 10 Ksh and one asking for a voluntary donation only (an ikotoilet now run by the Catholic Church). In a survey of users of an ikotoilet that replaced a free-of-charge but run-down public toilet on a marketplace, we found 7.7% to be ‘very satisfied’ with the charge for the ikotoilet immediately after the opening, and 68% five months later. Overall satisfaction with the ikotoilet showed 90% of users were ‘very satisfied’ directly after the opening, and 92.5% five months later, as compared to 2.2% being ‘very satisfied’ with the old public toilet and 87.9% ‘very dissatisfied’ (Dietsche et al., Citation2012).
‘Conversion factor’ here is used in a success-neutral sense, i.e. conversion factors can both promote and hinder capabilities. It is of course possible to only focus on success-promoting factors, i.e. conversion factors only as means rather than also as obstacles. However, as we will see in the further discussion below, at least for explanatory purposes the success-neutral use is much more fruitful.
Without doubt, Ecotact also faces many challenges in this matter. For example, the water-saving taps in the ikotoilets were not designed for such high usage and therefore regularly break down. Likewise, during our field research we got the impression that the current soap dispensers are not an effective (or at least only a weakly effective) design, because many users do not know how to use them, and therefore they regularly break down as well. These examples show that we should think of conversion factors as built into the design of resources.
de Herdt and Bastiaensen (Citation2008) stress the need to extend the analysis of agency freedom also to the institutions in which agency takes place and which may be transformed via agency over time. In their view, agency freedom is therefore an attribute of relationships and not of individuals.
A similar argument can be made for the ikotoilets in schools. For reasons of space we focus here on the slum/urban centre contrast only.
Interview with John Karioki, 8 February 2011.
From an interview with a member of Nairobi City Council who wishes to remain anonymous.
Interview with David Kuria, 7 February 2011.
By the spring of 2011, such outlets were provided only by ikotoilets and Nakumatt, a supermarket chain.
From an interview with a member of Nairobi City Council who wishes to remain anonymous.
See http://www.acumenfund.org/investment/ecotact-limited.html (accessed 20 July 2011).
Interview with David Kuria, 7 February 2011.
This perspective is of course not exclusive or in contradiction to the comparative perspective, but rather shifts the focus of attention.
Interview with David Kuria, 7 February 2011.
We leave aside here an idea promoted by Ashoka, the collaborative cooperation of social entrepreneurs, because the main goal there is the development of new ideas and projects by way of cross-fertilization.
This being said, we note that even the urban ikotoilets are constantly evolving in terms of new design features (such as integrated biodigestors). Consistent with this, Kuria understands environmental sustainability as a matter of a continuous process of trying out and implementing new features.
Here the strategy developed by Seelos and Mair Citation(2010) from a critical realist perspective, to focus on ‘closure mechanisms’ (the mechanisms that facilitate the successful replication of the model), is particularly fruitful.
To be sure, it is logically possible to produce an environment-sensitive or robust design, but this is likely very expensive. It is also possible to ‘change the world’ according to the conditions of the lab. This is a point made by Elkington et al. Citation(2010) on the analogy of the institutional context facilitating big business corporations.
There are boundary cases in the urban centres, such as the ikotoilet on the Catholic campus, where this mechanism is also blocked (users can donate if they wish to). The relative difficulties encountered by this urban centre ikotoilet confirm our point.
Interview with David Kuria, 7 February 2011.
Explanatory commodity fetishism is possible independently of commitments to primary goods or capabilities. Arguably, however, the ideal-theory focus of Rawlsian philosophy tends to render invisible pragmatic questions of direct and indirect conversion in real-world contexts.
The terminology of ‘explanatory commodity fetishism’ may seem paradoxical. The original normative critique of Sen points away from resources towards the ends that they are used for, whereas in the present argument the claim is that we should focus more on the resource black box. Thus, a better term might seem to be ‘explanatory capabilities fetishism’ (proposed to us by Lieske Voget-Kleschin), i.e. a focus on capabilities impact to the detriment of the analysis of a capability-sensitive discussion of goods. Because the main goal here is to question the given nature of goods as objects and the factors explaining their reproduction, we stick to the terminology of explanatory commodity fetishism.
