Examining Collective Action Through the Capability Approach: The Example of Community Currencies

Abstract

Collective action—the involvement of a group of people carrying out common and voluntary actions to pursue shared interests—has a high potential to contribute to agency and wellbeing freedom. It is a current and recurrent phenomenon in society, but it is still poorly explained by the Capability Approach (CA). This paper’s main aim is to look more closely at how the CA can be used to better frame, understand and evaluate the impacts of collective action. Based on a discussion of the literature on collective capabilities and agency we suggest extending the perspective of the original approach, mainly through a more explicit distinction between three layers: individual processes, collective action, and social institutions. We argue that such an extension is useful in order to evaluate how collective action can alter wellbeing and agency freedoms. By way of example, we look at community currency (CC) initiatives—trading schemes that are designed and implemented as a supplement to the legal tender money—and employ the three-layered CA to describe and evaluate the effects of acting collectively in such a setting. We also point out what distinguishes such an assessment from other approaches that we have found in the literature on CC. We conclude that a more systematic analysis of collective action through the CA may enable the latter to provide for useful assessments of collective action.

Keywords:

• Capability Approach
• Agency
• Agency freedom
• Wellbeing freedom
• Collective action
• Community currencies
• Collective capabilities

Acknowledgements

We are particularly grateful for comments by two anonymous reviewers as well as by Jürgen Volkert and Ortrud Leßmann, two of our colleagues in the research project GeNECA on “Just Sustainable Development based on the Capability Approach,” funded by the German ministry for research (www.geneca.ufz.de). Two further anonymous referees’ on a prior version (cp. its precursor Mock et al. 2013, developed within GeNECA) encouraged us to reorientate the paper from an empirical to a more conceptual paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Christine Polzin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4150-5203

About the Authors

Dr Felix Rauschmayer is a senior researcher at the Department of Environmental Politics at UFZ, Leipzig, Germany. His background is in Ecological Economics. His research focusses on theory and practice of decision processes in environmental governance and on the role of needs and capabilities in the transition to sustainable development.

Christine Polzin is a PhD student and research associate at UFZ. Her current work focusses on the interplay between institutions, identity and behaviour change towards sustainability. She has worked on a range of interdisciplinary projects in the area of sustainability research and holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford.

Mirijam Mock is a PhD student and research associate at the Institute for Social Change and Sustainability of Vienna University of Economics and Business. Her research interests focus on transition processes, lifestyles, participation, and social innovation in the field of sustainable development. She has worked on various inter- and transdisciplinary projects in the field of sustainability research and has a background in sociology and development studies.

Dr Ines Omann is a senior researcher at the Institute for Ecological Economics, Vienna University of Economics and Business. She has been working in sustainability science for 20 years among others at the Department of Environmental Politics at UFZ, Leipzig, Germany. Her research centres around the themes of sustainability transitions, quality of life research, scenario development, trandisciplinarity, and good life for all. She also works as a moderator and facilitator in public participation processes and workshops.

Notes

1 While we agree with Alkire (2002) and others that this space of values and goals is multi-dimensional, we want to highlight the tension between self- and other-regarding goals that has been prominent throughout Sen’s work.

2 We use the term collective processes to describe processes that are driven by a group of people may share common interests and who undertake common, cooperative and voluntary actions to pursue those interests.

3 While it seems plausible that different resources and conversion factors are required for wellbeing capabilities than for agency capabilities, we are not aware of any study in this respect.

4 The embeddedness in natural systems has been discussed, for example, in Holland (2008), Polishchuk and Rauschmayer (2012), Peeters, Dirix, and Sterckx (2015), Pelenc and Ballet (2015).

5 Please note that what appears to be changeable or unchangeable differs from one person to another. For people in strong positions of power, national or international institutions may be changeable to some extent, while people with low self-efficacy may not even think that they may be able to change local institutions. Moreover, such assessments of one’s own ability to change social institutions may alter over time.

6 Following Robeyns (2005), the CA is defined through ethical individualism (ibid., 109), and can in principle account for groups and social structures although it does not provide a profound theory of society, institutions, or organizations. Thus, “more elaboration and integrity on collectivity issues is needed particularly because CA scholars often involve collective entities in their claims for justice (e.g., Nussbaum 2011)” (Griewald and Rauschmayer 2014, 31).

7 Along the discussion on Sen’s (2002) definition and examples of collective capabilities, many scholars are against the use of the term “capabilities” for those collective capabilities that may harm group members or non-members. In our view, this is an overly harsh restriction, as the term “individual capabilities” is not restricted in this way. Even for the capability of cycling around (let alone: driving around), harming oneself and others is a possible and not unlikely outcome.

8 We exclude barter markets from the following description as they account for only 1.4% of the 3,418 projects in the study of Seyfang and Longhurst (2013).

9 It is important to note that a vast part of the CC literature deals with issues that cannot be captured by the arrows depicted in Figure 2—see discussion below.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [grant number 01UN1015A].