'Agency goals' play an important role in Sen's capability approach. They are an acknowledgement that individuals aspire to achieve objectives other than their own immediate well-being. This article argues that using agency goal achievement as a basis for evaluating inequality or disadvantage is...

This article explores the positive contribution a focus on physical religious spaces makes to development practice. By taking an ethnographic approach in studying religious spaces it is possible for practitioners of development to understand the values and beliefs of adherents, which can help...

This article is situated at the intersection of the debates over the role of democracy in enhancing development and regarding human rights-based approaches to development. Decentralization acts as a lens through which the interaction of democratization, development, and human rights can be...

This paper considers the implications for poverty measurement of the observed fact that any individual's level of deprivation is a function not only of his own income, but of the general level of prosperity of the group to which he is affiliated. Individual deprivation functions are specialized...

Capabilities theorists hold that adaptive preference (APs) are problematically shaped by deprivation, and that they thus merit public interrogation. However, it is unclear what differentiates APs from preferences worthy of public respect. Thinking of APs as procedurally non-autonomous promises...

While Sen has written extensively on the social factors of capabilities, the exact nature of these social factors and how they interact to form and influence capabilities is contested and unclear. Consequently, how to coherently integrate social components into capability research remains a...

An important issue for health policy and planning is the way in which multiple sources of disadvantage, such as class, gender, caste, race, ethnicity, and so forth, work together to influence health. Although 'intersectionality' is a topic for which there is growing interest and evidence,...

This paper examines inequalities in child malnutrition in India through three distinct — although inter-related — types of empirical analysis. First, it reports the socio-economic inequalities in childhood malnutrition across different Indian states. Second, it decomposes the gap in...

The German conditions of life approach to the measurement of well-being bears some resemblance to the capability approach (CA) and can be said to anticipate some of its features. In particular, both approaches view well-being as inherently multidimensional and suggest that freedom of choice is...