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State of The Art
The conceptualisation and measurement of poverty is a task of considerable sociological importance as well as policy relevance. Contemporary European poverty analysis continues to be heavily influenced by Peter Townsend's relative deprivation approach, and while relative income measures of poverty--for example, measuring poverty at 60 per cent of national median income--are experiencing something of a challenge in recent years, they continue to represent the dominant approach to measuring poverty in Europe.
Nonetheless, poverty analysis is currently undergoing a multidimensional turn, due, in part, to a growing awareness of the limitations of such relative income measures. This turn towards multidimensionality has resulted in a growing number of multidimensional poverty applications in both European and non-European contexts (e.g. Coromaldi and Zoli, 2012; Whelan et al., 2014; Waglé, 2008), as well as debates about and innovations in the measurement of multidimensional poverty itself (e.g. Alkire and Foster, 2011; Alkire and Santos, 2010; Ravallion, 2011; Ferreira and Lugo, 2013). However, a central argument presented in this paper is that the problems of income-centric analysis are only in part measurement problems--they are also, very substantially, problems of conceptualisation, and the conceptualisation of poverty remains a neglected aspect of this multidimensional turn to date. In this paper, we discuss a number of problems associated with the dominant Townsendian framework for conceptualising and measuring poverty, and articulate an alternative framework, based on the capability approach, which, we argue, can overcome these difficulties.
The capability approach was developed initially by the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. Its central concepts are functionings and capabilities. "Functionings" refer to the various things a person succeeds in "doing or being", such as participating in the life of society, being healthy, and so forth, while "capabilities" refer to a person's real or substantive freedom to achieve such functionings: for example, the ability to take part in the life of society, etc. (Sen, 1999: 75). Of crucial importance is the emphasis on real or substantive--as opposed to formal--freedom, since capabilities are opportunities that one could exercise if so desired.
The central claim of the approach is that in interpersonal analysis, such as poverty analysis, our focus should be on what people can do and be and not...