Alkire, Sabina

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Alkire, Sabina

PERSONAL:

Education: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, B.A., 1989; Magdalen College, University of Oxford, Diploma of Theology, 1992, M.Phil., 1994, M.S., 1995, Ph.D., 1999.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative, Department of International Development, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford, Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TB, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Oxford Policy and Human Development Initiative, Oxford University, Oxford, England, director, and Global Equity Initiative, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, research associate. Has worked for Commission on Human Security, World Bank, Oxfam, and Asia Foundation

AWARDS, HONORS:

Webb Medley Prize.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Valuing Freedoms: Sen's Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

(With Edmund Newell) What Can One Person Do? Faith to Heal a Broken World, Church Publishing (New York, NY), 2005.

(Editor, with F. Comim and M. Qizilbash) The Capability Approach: Concepts, Measures and Applications, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 2008.

Contributor to books, including Human Insecurity in a Global World, edited by L. Chen, S. Fukuda-Parr, and E. Seidensticker, Harvard University Press, 2003; Culture and Public Action: A Cross-disciplinary Dialogue on Development Policy, edited by. V Rao and M. Walton, Stanford University Press, 2004; and The Philosophy of Need, edited by S. Reader, Cambridge University Press, 2006. Contributor to journals, including Journal of Human Development, Lancet, and Social Indicators Research.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sabina Alkire is the director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University in England. The initiative's aim is to foster economic progress, individual freedom, and human well-being in impoverished countries. She is a proponent of the capability approach [CA] created by Amartya Sen. This philosophy emphasizes pluralism, reasoning, and increasing the range of actions available to people—that is, their capabilities. Her first book, Valuing Freedoms: Sen's Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction, explains this approach and explores ways it can be put into practice to evaluate economic development efforts.

Sen's theories are not specific about which capabilities are most valuable to a population, but to Alkire, this opens up the possibility of assigning value to a broad range of activities, not just those that have a measurable economic impact. If an activity enhances people's control over their lives and ability to participate in community decisions, for instance, it can be valued, she says. She devotes the first part of her book to setting up a framework for applying the capability approach and the second part to using this approach to assess programs financed by the international aid group Oxfam in Pakistan. She also relates what a more traditional tool, cost-benefit analysis, would determine about these programs.

A literacy program for women, for instance, would not be deemed valuable by typical cost-benefit analysis, as few Pakistani women have paid employment. However, Alkire points out, the capability approach finds much to value in the literacy classes. They help women recognize that they are men's equals, become independent thinkers, and stand up to domestic abuse. They also decrease women's isolation from one another and allow them to take pleasure in the act of learning. "The reader is struck by the profound impact on wellbeing of the classes, and cost benefit analysis stands starkly against this as incapable of measuring a wellbeing change," remarked reviewer Iona Tarrant in the Journal of Development Studies.

Alkire also applies the capability approach to Oxfam-supported programs for raising goats and cultivating roses. She finds that cost-benefit analysis would find only the former valuable, but the capability approach, recognizing benefits other than monetary ones, deems the latter worthwhile as well. She writes: "the activities' tangible income, and their associated effects on life, health, and economic security were never regarded as the most important impacts by participants. This was the case even for an activity which had significant economic returns, namely, goat rearing." As Solange Regina Marin, in a critique for the Review of Social Economy, put it, Alkire believes "that decisions concerning directing scarce resources to activities of development cannot be based only on economic judgement … but must include value judgments and moral judgement."

Numerous scholars have expressed doubts that the capability approach could be put into operation, but some reviewers thought Alkire had made a persuasive case that the approach has the potential for practical use. "That Alkire manages to operationalise and apply the theory to concrete cases, whilst preserving the richness of the capability approach itself, is an impressive achievement," related Tarrant. Marin offered similar praise, saying: "Valuing Freedoms represents a successful effort to put the CA into practice without losing its main features that are linked with Sen's practical reason and ethical rationality." Marin added that "Alkire demonstrates a wide knowledge of Sen's work, which is surely needed to understand properly the CA and its informational and valuational issues." Tarrant called Alkire's explanation of Sen's ideas—and their critics—"lucid," "insightful," and "extremely well referenced." Summing up the book, Tarrant described it as "a breath of fresh air" that "makes a valuable contribution both in developing and defending Sen's capability approach, and showing the fruitfulness of its application."