Amartya Sen’s contribution to development thinking

Abstract

D evelopment as Freedom (DaF) presents an overview of Sen's thinking about development, pulling together ingredients familiar from his previous work. Assessing this book, then, comes close to evaluating Sen's contribution to de-velopment thinking. Undoubtedly, the contribution is of major importance, and we shall spend the first part of this essay explaining why we believe this to be the case. Yet there remain problems, both at a theoretical and political/policy level, which mean, in our view, that for some important issues in contempo-rary development, one has to go beyond Sen. Why we believe this will form the second part of the essay. Amartya Sen's major achievement lies in his capabilities (variously termed " freedoms ") approach. In this he not only presents a philosophical alternative to the utilitarianism which underpins so much of economics, but, in so doing, also offers an alternative development objective which can be used to inform a wide range of issues, from markets to gender, democracy to poverty. In brief he argues that " for many evaluative purposes, the appropriate 'space' is nei-ther that of utilities (as claimed by welfarists), nor that of primary goods (as demanded by Rawls), but that of substantive freedoms—the capabilities—to choose a life one has reason to value " (74).