Pioneers gathering on the capability approach and technology / design

“Freedom is both the means and end of development”, says economist Amartya Sen. He and philosopher Martha Nussbaum have had immense influence on debates about global justice, poverty and development since the 1980s, with their ‘capability approach’. The core idea: development is about expanding people’s positive freedoms or human capabilities that allow them to lead the lives they have reasons to value. Lives in which many different things can and will be important. Poverty and development are multidimensional. When talking about poverty, we often talk about the gross national product of developing countries or poor people living on less than $2/day. In the end, however, income or resources more broadly are just means and what in the end matters is what they allow people to do and be.

Nussbaum and Sen have also had a great influence on my drive as a researcher. Having some background in technology and development studies, I was sort of surprised to notice that development and global justice were topics not addressed within the 3TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology when I joined at the end of 2006. If technology raises so many ethical questions in our Western societies, then surely it must also raise ethical questions in the context of developing countries? In the capability approach I finally found an angle to start working on this. It was not difficult to make a conceptual connection, once I had discovered the capability approach: surely all technologies are meant to expand some human capabilities. But that is of course a very easy thing to say. What does it really mean? As Sabine Alkire noted a couple of years ago about the capability approach: we still have to trace its implications all the way through^*. Other people are exploring this for fields like education, health care and economics. In the upcoming years, we will try to do so in the area of technology and design, in our research project ‘Technology & Human Development - A Capability Approach’, for which we got a grant last April.

Last week I felt really encouraged in my work by attending the annual conference of the HDCA, the Human Development and Capability Association, this year taking place in Lima, Peru. About three hundred participants were expected, but at the last moment there was a large influx of Peruvian people, apparently eager to take this opportunity to reflect on the theory and practise of development. Thus about 500 people gathered there, both practitioners and researchers, from both the North and the South, to discuss human development. My own personal highlight was that I had managed to organize a panel session there with other people interested in the capability approach and technology/design, the first one ever at a HDCA conference. Here’s some examples of topics that were presented: Crighton spoke about capabilities to design of indigenous people in Australia. Paolo and Colleen reported on their efforts to apply the capability approach to matters of (technological) risk. Dorothea ‘operationalized’ the capability approach to be used in planning for ICT4D projects. Alvaro and Andres discussed the topic of participation and agency in some energy technology projects in Bolivia and Guatamala. And me - I shared some critical thoughts that I have been developing on technology, the capability approach and neutrality towards the good life. Pioneers in this area gathering, very exciting.

A thematic group on the capability approach, technology and design was organized on the spot (literally, with Crighton making a Google group for us at his laptop while we were discussing our plans), under the umbrella of the HDCA. If you share our interest in this topic, you can find us at http://groups.google.com/group/hdca-technologydesign. At this moment, none of us is coming from a developing country. So we would welcome especially new participants from the South.

To be continued (both my blogging efforts and my research)…

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* Alkire, Sabina. 2005. Why the Capability Approach? Journal of Human Development 6 (1):115-133.