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Introduction
A framework for poverty analysis must seek to reflect societal change and economic shocks, such as the current crisis, in distinctly human terms. For this, we need the right concepts and measures. In this paper, we discuss some problems associated with existing approaches to conceptualising poverty, social exclusion and deprivation, and discuss the contribution that the capability approach might offer in resolving them. It is argued that the capability approach can provide a framework that can reflect the many ways in which human lives can be blighted, and which thus offers some promise for poverty analysis.
This may come as some surprise to those familiar with the exchange between Sen and Peter Townsend in the 1980s (Sen, 1983, 1985; Townsend, 1985), which did little to endear the social policy community to Sen's approach. However, there are at least two reasons why it is timely to reconsider the potential of the capability approach. First, in the years since the Sen-Townsend debate, the capability approach has become much more prominent. It has provided the conceptual underpinning for the UN's Human Development Reports (UNDP, 2010), has influenced the understanding of well-being in the recent 'Sarkozy Commission' (Stiglitz et al., 2009) and has been the basis for the Equality and Human Rights Commission's approach to monitoring equality in the UK (Burchardt and Vizard, 2011). Given this increased prominence, we might ask whether some advantages of the approach have been overlooked.
Second, there is, at present, an unresolved tension within poverty analysis between a desire to emphasise a broad measure of multidimensional poverty (e.g. Atkinson et al., 2002: 79) and an insistence on conceptualising poverty in narrower terms around a core concept of resources (e.g. Nolan and Whelan, 1996). One of the functions of the concept of social exclusion was to cover important additional terrain beyond the concept of poverty (e.g. Room, 1995). However, the lack of progress in identifying what is meant by social exclusion not only raises questions about its suitability as a concept, but also places this additional terrain in jeopardy. It will be argued that the capability approach offers a way to reconcile this tension between narrow and broad conceptions of poverty, by respecting the former without losing sight of the latter.
The...