Development as freedom – how the Capability Approach can be used in ICT4D research and practice

1. Introduction

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become an important part of current development agendas and the use of ICT in development practice is rarely disputed. What has been disputed however – at least by the research community – is how and why ICTs should be used for development. In the ICT4D research community, the very notion of development has increasingly been a subject of debate and we are asking ourselves: what development is? And how ICTs can contribute to whatever we consider this development to be? A general trend has been that we have started challenging the mainstream neoliberal development discourse (the debate having been even more fueled by the present USA–Europe economic uncertainty) and most ICT4D researchers are today moving away from traditional theories of development and contest the measuring of development solely in economic terms. Our field is increasingly inspired by new development measures such as quality-of-life, human development and the freedom to live a life that we have reasons to value. Whereas we welcome this broadening of focus, we still find the field in need of articulating the actual human development outcomes and how these outcomes can be evidenced.

We initiated this special issue because we have longed for a debate about how ICTs can contribute to development with an explicit focus on the development outcomes. Whereas much research has demonstrated that ICTs, for example, can provide people in developing countries with more information, our vision was a special issue that seeks to understand what kind of development outcomes this information can yield (if any), and also how these can be evidenced. In a time where too many development agencies view ICTs as an end in itself (Qureshi, 2011), we wanted to move beyond the mere access and use aspects of ICTs. We wanted to know what these ICT opportunities were good for; we wanted to know if and in what way someone actually reaped benefits from these opportunities.

We found that one promising approach in constructively framing such human development outcomes is provided by Amartya Sen's Capability Approach (Sen, 1999). However, whereas many references have been made to Sen, we have found that deep engagement with his theories is still rare – with a few, but very interesting efforts (most notably three previous issues of the Information Technology for Development Journal by Bada and Madon (2006), Silva and Westrup (2009) and Qureshi (2011)).

The notion of human development in the spirit of Sen (1999), being acknowledged by researchers does, however, not necessarily mean that people in development practice or people governing this practice share this view. We would argue that most development practices and evaluations of these practices are still based on ideas of modernization, evolutionism and the need for modern market systems where economic growth is still considered the most important measure of development. Some would argue that this is not the case, that the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) has become a powerful alternative measure. We agree that this measure is useful and it is indeed sometimes used as a complement to economic measures. The HDI is, however, not fully in accordance with Sen's basic assumptions. An obvious disadvantage of an index applied to the national level is that it does not necessarily capture differences within the country, e.g. based on geographical regions or gender. A more fundamental drawback, from a Senian perspective, is that it does not take into account the individual. For Sen, development starts with individuals who should be able to decide for themselves what they value and have the capabilities to set their own agenda regarding the goals of development and the ways to get there. Following that line of arguing, we cannot say that the measures in HDI are things that people have most reason to value. Sen takes a bottom-up perspective on development, believing that it is the entrepreneurial spirit in every person that should be encouraged and facilitated for true development to take place. It is the details of this facilitation that should be in the focus of the development agenda (Sen, 1999).

Targeting our efforts towards Sen's notion of allowing people the freedom to live a life that they have reasons to value may sound difficult, even utopian. And how do we measure or evidence this freedom? As soon as we move away from measures such as GDP per capita or exact poverty lines it gets harder to show undisputable evidence that any development is going on. An additional complication in this respect is that the openness and conceptual richness of Sen's Capability Approach makes it hard to operationalize. This could well be a reason why its impact on the development practice and evaluation so far is limited.

This special issue addresses this problem by discussing conceptual and methodological difficulties involved in making the Capability Approach more operative. Papers demonstrate how we can overcome these deficiencies by offering elaborations of some of the central concepts of the Capability Approach; guidelines on how to design technology in a participatory way; and methods for capturing, analyzing and evaluating capabilities and functionings.

We hope that this special issue will contribute to a better understanding of how the field of ICT4D – research as well as practice – can better engage with development theories in the spirit of Sen.

2. This issue

The theme of this special issue is human development as defined by Sen. The papers have been selected because they critically engage with Sen's theories and extend the applicability of them. We have chosen papers that reflect and elaborate on the constructs of the Capability Approach and papers seeking to explicate analytical considerations of how the Capability Approach may be operationalized in order to guide empirical data collection and analysis. Sen's Capability Approach urges for a participatory approach to both the means and ends of development and this special issue provides examples of how this can be done – from the very design of the technology to evaluations of its impact.

Devendra Thapa, Maung K. Sein and Øystein Sæbø critically engage with Sen in their paper “Building Collective Capabilities through ICT in a Mountain Region of Nepal: Where Social Capital leads to Collective Action” by arguing that he has an overly individualistic emphasis. In their study of an ICT initiative in a remote Nepalese region, they show how Sen's Capability Approach can be complemented by incorporating theoretical and conceptual premises that emphasize the collective and society. Their findings show how ICTs can increase the social capital of a community which in turn leads to human development in the sense of newly created collective capabilities through collective action. By incorporating the collective level to Sen's Capability Approach, Thapa, Sein and Sæbø provide us with a new analytical lens to view how ICT can contribute to human development. Whether capabilities can be collective or not is an ongoing debate among Capability Approach theorists and the two following papers also touch upon the matter.

In the paper “The Capability Approach as a Tool for Development Evaluation – Analyzing Students Use of Internet Resources”, Mathias Hatakka and Jenny Lagsten demonstrate how Sen's Capability Approach can be used in order for us to gain a deeper understanding of why and how development outcomes are achieved. In acknowledging the methodological difficulties in using the Capability Approach they have made their own operationalization of the Capability Approach and they demonstrate its usefulness by applying their method to empirical data on students' use of Internet resources. In describing their method they also comment on the ongoing debate on whether capabilities should be pre-defined in a Capability Approach analysis, arguing that in the case used in this paper, an open evaluation –without pre-defined measures – was needed. The main contribution of this paper is the method for data collection and analysis that Hatakka and Lagsten have provided us with. Another contribution is the findings from the empirical data which gives us an increased understanding of students' use of Internet resources and which development outcomes this use can yield.

In a similar line of thought as Hatakka and Lagsten, i.e. addressing the methodological difficulties in using the Capability Approach, Dorothea Kleine, Ann Light and Maria-José Montero present the Choice Framework as a translation tool to enable an operationalization of the Capability Approach. Their paper “Signifiers of the life we value? – Considering Human Development, Technologies and Fair Trade from the Perspective of the Capabilities Approach” shows how the Capability Approach can be applied in ICT4D action research by using the case of a Fair Tracing project. The article demonstrates how their findings from the field research, concerning which capabilities people desired, have directed their design decisions in making a system that supports both producers and consumers with the information wanted. The findings from the Fair Tracing project revealed competing capabilities (i.e. the capability of being able to make informed choices was competing with the capabilities of having time available and the ability to trust). Just as was the case in the two previous papers, we also find this paper to discuss the individual versus collective dilemma in the Capabilities Approach based on how sometimes individuals can only achieve changes that they personally value through collective action.

Design is also the theme of the last research paper by Aditya Johri and Joyojeet Pal, entitled “Capable and Convival Design (CDD): A Framework for Designing Information and Communication Technologies for Human Development”. It is interesting in the way it addresses development issues in the technology design process. It offers a novel and beneficial approach to applying the Capability Approach (from Sen) in conjunction with the concept of conviviality (from Illich) in a “user empowering” design process. The article proposes and discusses a design framework which is applied to an ICT4D case study. The design guidelines the authors suggest move beyond classical guidelines such as “usability” and “interaction” by including new ones such as “human self-expression” and “creativity”. In so doing, this article should be of relevance not only for ICT4D, but for any IT field interested in design aspects.

In our view- from-practice section, William Wresch and Simon Fraser's paper “ICT-enabled Market Freedoms and their Impacts in Developing Countries: Opportunities, Frustrations, and Surprises” presents a case illustrating the practical challenges small Caribbean companies are experiencing in achieving the economic freedoms that ICTs are supposed to bring. Referring to Sen's notion of freedom to access markets, they discuss the opportunities for ICTs to enable small companies in developing countries to take part in the process of globalization by being able to compete on global markets. Wresh and Fraser, however, illustratively demonstrate how ICTs easily can become a double-edged sword: whereas the rhetoric of ICT for development is that they give these small businesses an opportunity to “find their niche and compete with giants”, they remark that one may have overlooked the fact that these giants might have ICTs too. Wresh and Fraser conclude by alerting policy-makers on what can be done in order to improve the situation and they also call for further research on small businesses in developing countries.

All these articles contribute to a most welcome critical and practical engagement with Sen's Capability Approach. They show that it is a suitable and useful lens in order for us to discuss what kind of development is sought after and to investigate what benefits ICT4D projects can – and cannot – bring. Through the various operationalizations and methodological guidelines, these researchers have extended the applicability of the Capability Approach and we look forward to a future engagement in the area.

The editors thank all the authors and all the reviewers for all the time and efforts they have put into contributing to this special issue.