Social Justice without Dividing: Mapping collective social intent within the capabilities space

Abstract

Modern development approaches are often seen as reflective of the social realities of the developed, and not sufficiently sensitive to those of developing world. Sen's capabilities approach to development has also attracted one such criticism. The capabilities approach thrives on the informational comprehensiveness of its framework, primarily to capture a disaggregated account of people's wellbeing. Commendable for acquiring a true measure of people's entitlement deficit, such an approach is fundamentally based on notions of distributive social justice which raises concern for its operationalization in collective social setups of the type prevailing predominantly in the developing countries. Social embeddedness in the latter type of social setups makes individuals inseparable parts of various social collectivities. Both individuals and a considerable, if not the entire, part of their wellbeing remains inseparably entrenched within the collectivities. Distributive social justice approaches, on the other hand, need individuals as separate units of analyses. Herein rests the inconsistency which this study primarily examines. The thesis shows that Sen's approach suffers a crucial insufficiency in capturing the soul of collective intent which is essentially irreducible. The insufficiency creeps in because of Sen's identity dependent positioning of individuals with respect to their perception of social good in a social space. It is seen as catering only to the individualistic social setups of the developed world. To make good the deficiency, the thesis proposes that along with its process and opportunity aspects, the capabilities space should also contain formative aspect of freedoms, to enable it to capture wellbeing both in individualistic and collectivist social setups. Beyond this identification, the study highlights the manner in which the formative aspect of freedoms could be integrated into the capabilities matrix. Towards this end, the study proposes a methodology based on the conceptual frameworks of structural and social network analyses. An affiliation network is devised to map formative aspect of freedoms into the capabilities space. This methodological framework is then operationalized in the empirical setting provided by Pakistani social structure to see how the formative aspect of freedoms gives greater context to the collective intent of a social structure within the capabilities space.