COVID-19 as a Capability Crisis: Using the Capability Framework to Understand Policy Challenges

Abstract

This paper shows how the policy challenges arising from COVID-19 can be understood by drawing on core concepts from the capability approach developed by Sen and others.

Keywords:

• Covid 19
• Capability approach
• Sen
• Human development
• Rationality
• Social protection
• Inequalities
• Public deliberation

Acknowledgements

We are particularly grateful to Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental Data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2020.1789079.

About the Authors

Paul Anand is a Professor of Economics at the Open University and Research Associate at Oxford University and the London School of Economics. From the 2000s, he has led projects that were among the first to measure capabilities explicitly and works with a number of researchers and policy-makers around the world on capability assessment.

Bob Ferrer is a Professor of Family and Community Medicine and a practicing family physician at the University of Texas. His work seeks to make clinical services more responsive to patients’ social needs while also pursuing multi-sector collaborations to address community-level determinants of health.

Qin Gao is a Professor of Social Policy and Social Work and the Founding Director of the China Center for Social Policy at Columbia University. Dr Gao’s research examines poverty, inequality, migration, human development, and social policy, with a particular focus on China and its international comparisons.

Ricardo Nogales is a Research Officer at the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative, University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at Universidad Privada Boliviana. He holds a PhD in Econometrics from the University of Geneva. His research focusses on quantitative analyses of multidimensional poverty, human development, and inequality.

Elaine Unterhalter is Professor of Education & International Development at University College London (UCL) and Co-Director of CEID (Centre for Education & International Development). She has written widely on the capability approach, gender and education, and was lead organiser of the 2019 HDCA Conference in London on the theme of connecting capabilities, a theme of her current research.

Notes

1 See also Robeyns (2006) on the importance of the practical value of this framework. Anand et al. (2020) provide a list of policy recommendations for government that focus particularly on aspects of human wellbeing while Coibion, Gorodnichenko, and Weber (2020) provide an early discussion of employment crisis.

2 People tend to be more inequality averse in the health domain compared with others but there is also some reason to hope that memories of this experience will have a long-lasting and positive impact on the expression of pro-social motivations.

3 On 24 March 2020, UNESCO published an estimate that 1.37 billion students, three quarters of all students world wide, were unable to attend school due to COVID-19. See also useful background in Krishnakumar and Nogales (2020) on education and decent work.

4 Hills (2012) for example identifies a significant problem of fuel poverty, which, if addressed by improving the environmental efficiency of homes available to those on the lowest incomes, would have benefits for health, for consumption, and the carbon reduction targets.

5 Lockdowns have pushed billions into online activities that have channelled financial benefits into a handful of the world’s largest corporations.