For their effective realization, human rights need to be perceived as culturally legitimate, and this in turn requires that they be justifiable pluralistically, engaging all reliable moral discourses. In so far as a human right calls for a specific capability to be respected, protected, and...

Capabilities are closely related to human rights. Capabilities are important human entitlements, inherent in the idea of basic social justice, and can be viewed as one species of a human rights approach. This paper explores this relationship, expanding on earlier publications, notably...

Using Sen's capability approach and an aggregation methodology based on the fuzzy set approach, this article attempts to move beyond the main criticisms of the United Nations Development Programme indices for analysis of gender inequality. The Relative Women Disadvantage Index can be used to...

The measurement of poverty is important yet problematic and controversial. This study assesses livelihood asset indicators from the sustainable livelihood approach as a multidimensional inverse proxy for poverty. The study develops and contrasts different asset-based proxies building on the five...

This paper analyses the role of finance and financial regulation in shaping capabilities, in the context of the 2008 financial crisis in the USA, paying particular attention to the implications for capability to be adequately housed. It argues that public reasoning and public action to safeguard...

Advocates or analysts of human rights and mainstream economists can find it difficult to communicate, let alone to arrive at agreement—when they communicate at all. Why is their dialogue non-existent or vexed? This paper identifies three deep-seated conceptual reasons. An improved dialogue can...

This article examines a new capability-based measurement framework that has been developed as a basis for equality and human rights monitoring in twenty-first-century Britain. We explore the conceptual foundations of the framework and demonstrate its practical application for the purposes of...

We argue that the capability approach can be very helpful in exploring the links between poverty and place, thereby providing a more accurate understanding of poverty processes. We demonstrate how Sen's list of 'conversion factors' allows one to incorporate but also to go beyond the usual...

The objective of this article is to identify some key dimensions for a human rights-based approach (HRBA) in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) monitoring processes. We aim to highlight not only how this can bring human rights and the MDGs closer to each other, but also how it can...