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The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice

Ryan Holifield, Jayajit Chakraborty, Gordon Walker

A capabilities approach to environmental justice

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Rosie Day
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11
A CAPABILITIES
APPROACH TO
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Rosie Day

Introduction
The capabilities approach was developed as a way of conceptualizing and assessing social
and economic development. Its well-known founders are Indian economist Amartya Sen, and
American philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Their main aim was to change the terms in which
we think about human wellbeing and in which we assess deprivation, equality, and ultimately
claims of justice and injustice. Although the capability approach has been hugely influential
in development thinking and wider social policy for nearly three decades, its impact on
environmental justice work has been fairly modest to date. As I shall argue in this chapter
though, it provides a potentially constructive and helpful framework that lends itself well to
thinking about how environmental matters become matters of justice and injustice. It has
resonances with other distributional and procedural formulations of justice as well as justice
as recognition, but is distinct in its core focus. Before elaborating further on how the approach
can be taken up in environmental justice, as well as some challenges in doing so, I start with
some brief explanation of its key ideas and how Sen and Nussbaum respectively argue that it
should be used to think about development and social justice.

What are capabilities?

Capabilities are what we are focusing on if we ask the question, ‘what is each person able
to do and to be?’ (Nussbaum 2011: 18). They are valued ‘beings and doings’. They can range
from the relatively trivial – e.g. I am able to go to the cinema – to the profound – e.g. I am
able to vote in national governmental elections; I am able to be healthy. The totality of the
things a person is able to do and to be is termed their ‘capability set’.
Sen and Nussbaum use the term ‘functionings’ to indicate the pursuits and states of being
that a person is actively engaged in, such as attending school, undertaking paid work, having
meaningful relationships. Capabilities are the opportunity to engage in valued functionings, so
for example the opportunity to work, to have relationships with others. The capability
approach takes capabilities rather than functionings as the object of concern because it is
argued that individuals should have the freedom to choose which functionings they engage
in at any given time, otherwise life would be intolerably prescribed. Sen calls a capability

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therefore ‘an aspect of freedom’ (2010: 287): it includes the ability to freely choose to do
something (or not) as well as the ability to actually do it.
Capabilities in the way that the term is used in the capabilities approach are not just internal
to the individual, i.e. the term does not refer to innate abilities and skills (although these may
also be involved). In this sense, the meaning does not completely correspond with the more
general use of the word. The capabilities approach recognizes explicitly that in order for
people to be able to engage in valued functionings, certain social and material arrangements
need to be in place, and likewise that the social and material environment at any time will
affect people’s ability to engage in valued functionings. Capabilities therefore are not just a
matter for the individual to work on, but for society to consider, assess, and ideally to promote
for its citizens, through its programmes, policies and ways of working.
Since the 1990s and before, Sen and Nussbaum have argued that capabilities are a better
focus for measuring the degree of development of any given society, and for making com-
parisons between societies, communities and individuals, than the usual alternative approaches
of measuring either income/wealth/GDP on the one hand, or subjective satisfaction (utility)
on the other (see e.g. Sen 1992, 1999, 2010; Nussbaum 2000, 2011; Nussbaum and Sen 1993).
Their critique of GDP or income per capita approaches to evaluating development high-
lighted a number of flaws, including the hiding of differences between individuals and groups
by aggregate measures, and the obliviousness of monetary based measures to many things that
matter to people’s real quality of life, such as health and political participation. Alternative
approaches that measure perceived satisfaction or the fulfilment of subjective preferences they
argue to be unsatisfactory for the reason that some people may be more easily satisfied than
others and those suffering from some form of deprivation may not be able easily to realize
their lack, or conceive of radically alternative lives. Repeatedly they argue that because it is
what people can be and do that actually matters, this is what should be assessed.
A major influence of the capability approach was its underpinning of the United Nations
Development Programme’s Human Development Index, used in annual Human Development
Reports from 1990 onwards to compare countries on their development levels (UNDP, nd).
The HDI is not a full realization of the capabilities approach as it measures development in
terms of per capita income, life expectancy and education only, aggregated at national level,
but nevertheless this represented a paradigm shift from the previous dominant conceptual-
izations which were confined to economic measures. Since the early reports, more measures
such as the gender development index have been added to the headline measure to improve
its scope, to the approval of capability theorists (Nussbaum 2011).

Capabilities, inequality and justice

It is the contention of the capabilities approach that inequalities should be evaluated in terms
of capabilities, measured at the individual level, i.e., the things that people are able to do and
be. As such, we might see it as a distributional approach to justice, but with capabilities as
the object of concern, rather than primary goods (such as income), which a more Rawlsian
approach for example might take (Rawls 1971). However, it is both more and less than a
distributional theory of justice: less because it does not offer, or intend to offer, a full account
of what a fair distribution would be, either of capabilities or anything else; and more because
it is a thicker notion of justice than one concerned only with distributional patterns (as is
Rawls’ theorization, but in a different way).
The approach does have important implications for thinking about distributions. The shift
of focus to outcomes (what people can be and do) rather than inputs (i.e. resources people

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have) is because, as they explain, individuals are not all able to convert resources to outcomes
at the same rate. The ability to do so will vary depending on personal characteristics, circum-
stances, environment and social context (see Sen 1999: 70). Different individuals therefore
are likely to need different levels of resources to reach similar outcomes. Thus, the approach
explicitly recognizes diversity and individual and group difference. Neither Nussbaum nor
Sen stipulate that equality in capability sets must be the goal, but if that was the chosen aim
in any instance, the approach would point towards potentially uneven allocation of resources
as necessary in order to achieve broadly equal outcomes (i.e. equity rather than equality).
The approach also has strong commitments to notions of procedural justice (see Chapter 9)
and human rights (see Chapter 13). To explore this further it is necessary to acknowledge the
differences between Sen and Nussbaum and their respective developments of the approach.
Their differences become clear in relation to how they tackle the fundamental questions of:
What capabilities matter? And how much of any given capability is needed?
Taking Nussbaum first: she argues that in pursuing justice (and in any practical endeavour
to improve human development) it is necessary to distinguish between capabilities which
are trivial – earlier I used the example of being able to go to the cinema – which we are not
really so worried about, and those which are more fundamental, such as being able to be in
good health, which we are really concerned with. In response to the question of what
capabilities matter, she proposes a list of ten Central Capabilities (see Table 11.1), which she
drew up through extensive recourse to a variety of philosophical sources. She contends that
the list is open-ended rather than definitive, but nevertheless should meet with ‘overlapping

Table 11.1 Nussbaum’s ten Central Capabilities (adapted and abridged from Nussbaum 2011: 33–34)

1. Life Being able to live a normal length life.

2. Bodily health Being able to have good health, to be adequately nourished and have good
shelter.
3. Bodily integrity Being free from physical assault; having freedom of movement; having
opportunities for sexual satisfaction; having reproductive choice.
4. Senses, Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think and reason in a way informed
imagination and cultivated by adequate education. Having freedom of expression and
and thought religious freedom. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and avoid
non-beneficial pain.
5. Emotions Being able to have attachments to other people and things. Being able to
experience and express emotions. Not having emotional development blighted.
6. Practical reason Being able to form a conception of the good and engage in critical reflection
regarding one’s life. Liberty of conscience.
7. Affiliation a) Being able to live with and toward others, engage in social interaction,
relationships and empathy; b) Having the social bases of self-respect; being
treated as of equal worth to others.
8. Other species Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants and nature.
9. Play Being able to laugh, play and enjoy recreational activities.
10. Control a) Political: having the right of political participation and free speech; b) Material:
over one’s being able to hold property on an equal basis to others; freedom from
environment unwarranted search and seizure; being able to seek employment on an equal basis
to others.

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consensus’ in pluralistic societies given its plural roots and lack of anchoring to any specific
belief set. Nussbaum sees this list as akin to a list of human rights that individuals should be
entitled to as a matter of justice, and sees it as the state’s responsibility, ideally to be consti-
tutionally enshrined, to ensure the social conditions for individuals to hold this capability
set. She terms her approach a ‘partial theory of social justice’ (2011: 40), in that it lays out
a set of minimum entitlements that she believes are a necessary condition of justice, but
not a list of all that is needed to live a full life in all contexts, nor any proposal for what a
fair distribution of opportunities beyond the list might look like. She acknowledges that it
would be necessary to provide further specification on some particulars in local context –
indeed, the list is very abstract – and in some cases on thresholds to be achieved as a minimum
for justice (for example, how many years of education should someone be entitled to?). This
further specification she believes should take place through democratic processes in national
contexts. Although a universalist approach to some degree therefore, it allows flexibility for
contextual variation in specifics.
Sen, on the other hand, has tended to focus on the informational and comparative use
of the capability approach for evaluating and deciding between real alternatives, rather than
formulating any notion of ideal arrangements which may not be achievable in practice; in
this sense, his is not a transcendental approach. As such, although he also acknowledges that
not all capabilities will be of equal import, he resists defining or suggesting any set of essential
or priority capabilities in the way that Nussbaum does. He argues that the capabilities that
are held to be essential, as well as the relative importance accorded to them, will vary from
context to context, and from project to project. Therefore, he argues, the capabilities of
concern and their relative weighting should be defined in context, through democratic,
deliberative processes. Sen puts great value on deliberative democracy as a good in itself,
and sees it as a crucial aspect of the approach, allowing reflection and consensus building,
even if that consensus does not stretch to all details. Thus, although democratic specification
of capabilities and thresholds comes into Nussbaum’s approach, deliberative democracy is
conceptually more fundamental and procedurally more central to Sen’s, whilst he does not
take the essential human rights angle that Nussbaum is committed to.

Capabilities and the environment

Neither Sen nor Nussbaum in their earlier writings on the capability approach make a great
deal of reference to environmental concerns, but in later writing they both address them to
some extent, although it remains somewhat in passing. In The Idea of Justice (2010), Sen
addresses sustainable development, and praises the Brundtland Commission’s highlighting of
the importance of the environment and ecological integrity to human wellbeing. Although
he does not dismiss the idea of the environment having a value in its own right, and emphasizes
humans’ responsibility to other, less powerful species, it is the services to humans both present
and future that he is most interested in. From the idea of sustainable development he embraces
the concern for future, as well as current, generations and proposes that not compromising
their capabilities (rather than the Brundtland language of needs) ought to be a concern in a
concept of ‘sustainable freedom’ (2010: 251; see also Sen 2013). Nussbaum in her 2011 book
similarly highlights the challenge of how to incorporate consideration of the capabilities of
future generations, with reference to environmental conditions, as something important
for future capability-focused work to address. At the same time, she departs a little from the
anthropocentric focus of sustainable development to spend some time advocating concern for
the welfare of non-human animals, suggesting that an ‘expanded notion of dignity’ to include

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that of other species might underpin a concept of the basic entitlements of non-human species,
though acknowledging that we are not yet at a point of broad social consensus on such
matters. Others have taken up discussion of sustainability in capabilities terms (e.g. Ballet
et al. 2013), generally finding the framework useful but incomplete, for example Pelenc et al.
(2013) suggest that sustainable freedom would need to be integrated with notions of
responsibility and voluntary self-restraint (see also Rauschmayer and Lessmann (2013) and
other papers in that special issue).
A notable paper by Holland (2008) builds on Nussbaum’s approach and proposes that
the list of Central Capabilities should be extended to include ‘being able to live one’s life
in the context of ecological conditions that can provide environmental resources and services
that enable the current generation’s range of capabilities; to have these conditions now and
in the future’ (2008: 324). She terms this additional capability a ‘meta-capability’ in that it
underpins many of the others. While Sen, Nussbaum and others have tended to position
environmental conditions as instrumental to capabilities, Holland’s move intentionally posi-
tions environmental integrity as something that is essential, irreducible and non-substitutable,
rather than a circumstantial condition that might conceivably be substituted with something
else. She argues that its inclusion in this way is commensurate with Nussbaum’s arguments
that the central capabilities on her list have complex interdependencies and some are pre-
figurative of others, viz. the capabilities of practical reason and of affiliation. My own view
is that Holland’s proposed capability is rather incongruent with the others in Nussbaum’s
set in that it is more circumstantial, and therefore more intuitively positioned as part of the
social and material pre-requisites of human capabilities, but Holland’s argument is defensi-
ble given that arguably the ontological division between capabilities and the arrangements that
enable them is fuzzy (see Smith and Seward 2009; also Schlosberg’s (2007: 30–31) reading of
what capabilities are).

Capabilities and environmental justice

If justice is about capabilities, and capabilities involve environmental conditions, then it is a
short step to conclude that environmental conditions can be a matter of justice, expressed in
capability terms – which brings us into the realm of environmental justice.
If we take Holland’s position, which builds on Nussbaum’s human rights style capability
approach, then we are already at the point of arguing that all individuals have a right – that
they can expect the state to protect – to live in an environment that provides the necessary
resources and services to enable their other essential capabilities. Any contravention of this
would constitute an injustice.
If on the other hand we don’t position the freedom to live in such environmental conditions
as a capability in itself, then justice and injustice claims can be made in terms of environmental
conditions being pre-requisites of other essential capabilities: thus they are derivative rights.
Many capabilities are likely to draw on environmental resources of one form or another whilst
others will be compromised by environmental hazards and environmental deprivations.
Facets of the environment in which people live then, will be essential to the realization and
maintenance of a broad capability set. Where capabilities are a matter of justice, the implicated
environmental aspects therefore become a matter of justice, unless the capability can be
supported in some other way. With colleagues, I have made this argument in the related area
of energy justice (Day et al. 2016), as have Sovacool et al. (2014) (see also Chapter 31). In
that case, it is actually important that energy is seen as a derived, circumstantial need, rather
than ‘access to energy’ being designated an essential capability in itself, because in the context

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of climate change and energy shortage, it may well be preferable if capabilities can be supported
by alternative means, without drawing on energy resources.
Positioning environmental conditions as a necessary precondition of many important
capabilities also works better when considering environmental justice through taking Sen’s
more open approach, where the capabilities that are considered important or essential to
wellbeing are not defined a priori, but rather through deliberation among those affected and
concerned. Such deliberation may not lead to living in a healthy environment or one with
ecological integrity being defined as a priority capability – either in absolute or comparative
terms – but environmental conditions and quality would still be implicated as a matter of justice
if a necessary pre-condition to the realization of capabilities that are held to be high priority.
Often though in the environmental justice arena we are not starting with a concern about
capabilities in a general sense, and what environmental conditions they need, but rather with
a specific environmental issue, hazard, or amenity, and a need to make judgements regarding
how it can be managed fairly. To illustrate how a capabilities perspective can be applied in
such cases, I will briefly discuss the example of ambient air pollution (see also Chapter 26).
Outdoor air pollution is an environmental hazard that affects millions of urban dwelling
people worldwide (WHO 2014a). It is a large and increasing problem in rapidly developing
economies such as China and India (Wang and Hao 2012; Guttikunda and Calori 2013),
caused mainly by growing numbers of motor vehicles and by the burning of coal, wood and
animal dung; but cities in Europe, North America and Australasia also regularly exceed safe
limits, largely due to vehicle emissions (WHO 2014b). Poor air quality is thought to contribute
to the premature deaths of well over 3.5 million people annually worldwide (WHO 2014c).
The effects of such pollution are not equal, however: older people, children, and those with
pre-existing lung and heart conditions have a higher risk of illness and death from high air
pollution episodes (Annesi-Maesano et al. 2003; Anderson et al. 2003). It is also the case that
air pollution is not evenly distributed, and it is often, though not always, linked with other
indicators of disadvantage such as higher poverty or social deprivation, or minority racial
groups (e.g. Jerret et al. 2001; Pearce et al. 2006; Brainard et al. 2002).
If we consider Nussbaum’s list of Central Capabilities, exposure to high levels of air
pollution is clearly likely to compromise some of them: the capability of life in some cases,
and bodily health in many others, thus giving the basis for claims of injustice. The compromis-
ing (and, it follows, the injustice) will be greater for people with higher exposure of course,
and for people with higher sensitivity. Poor air quality may have indirect effects on other
capabilities such as the ability to engage in recreation or to maintain social relationships (play
and affiliation) – if, for example, a sensitive person’s ability to leave the house is significantly
curtailed in high air pollution episodes. Following Nussbaum’s reasoning then, because it is
the state’s duty to provide the conditions for individuals to hold the full set of essential
capabilities, it becomes the state’s duty to ensure that people do not suffer from such poor air
quality that their capabilities are affected in these ways. This implies that legislation, policies
and planning regarding permissible emissions, and industrial, transport and urban planning will
be required, as a matter of justice.
Furthermore, this protection applies to all individuals and it is not a specific level of air
quality that is prescribed, but a level of safety, or freedom from harm. Some more sensitive
people may need more attention than others, in order to ensure their health. Thus, taking a
capabilities approach would justify, even require, paying attention to specific populations
such as children or older people, and taking particular measures to protect them. For example,
work in California has examined air quality in the vicinity of schools, on the basis that
children’s air quality is a particular concern due to their developing bodies and greater

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sensitivity (Pastor et al. 2006). Capabilities reasoning would endorse this approach and given
the finding of high respiratory risk from air pollution in the vicinity of many schools,
especially those with more poorer and minority children, it would also endorse the researchers’
recommended remedial measures in and around schools, such as improved ventilation, traffic
restrictions and building new schools away from busy roads. In general, as it may be hard to
reach all sensitive individuals with specific measures, ideally air quality should be high enough
that even fairly sensitive people are not unduly affected. However, a capabilities approach
might also justify other decisions, such as state subsidy for necessary medication, or provision
of recuperative trips, or any other selective intervention deemed to be effective. The point
is that unequal resources may need to be spent and differential treatment might be needed
in order to support a sufficiency of important capabilities for all individuals.
If we go with Sen’s approach, there are no specifically defined priority capabilities that
must be supported, but we can think about applying the approach to evaluate alternatives: for
example, if an industrial facility might be located in an area where jobs were needed, but there
were also concerns over the effects of the added pollution it might bring. The alternatives of
the community hosting or not hosting the facility would need to be evaluated in terms
of which had the most positive effect on the valued functionings and capabilities of individuals
in the community, with community members being free to decide on what those valued
functionings and capabilities are, and on how to weight them (for example, health might be
considered more important than jobs). Sen’s approach calls for collective deliberation and
decision-making on the important capabilities and on the weighing up of alternatives; it is not
meant to be a matter of individual consideration of personal priorities followed by voting. All
the same, outcomes for individuals remain the central concern, and it is conceivable therefore
that within a place-based ‘community’, groups with differing claims and views would emerge
and need to engage – herein lies the value of the deliberation.
Using capabilities to evaluate alternatives in this way, although pragmatic, could run the
risk of lacking vision and failing to imagine possibilities not immediately on the table. A
slightly different way to use Sen’s more open approach would be to use community deliberation
to define a set of priority capabilities, with generalized weightings, that could be used as a
basis for making decisions about proposals but also for strategic planning. This would then be
applicable in a similar way to Nussbaum’s list as considered above, but it would have a greater
degree of contextualization. Plans would need to be considered in terms of their effect on the
prioritized capability sets of individuals. Taking a specific hazard such as air pollution, it would
be an injustice to the extent that it affected individuals’ abilities to achieve a decent level of
any capabilities agreed to be essential.

Environmental justice scholarship and the capabilities approach

Edwards et al. (2015: 5) claim that ‘capabilities is rapidly becoming the core theoretical
edifice within which to understand and theorize (environmental) justice’. It is certainly
gathering interest, but more concrete applications are to date rarer in environmental justice
work. The first substantial discussion of its relevance in theoretical terms came in Schlosberg’s
(2007) book Defining Environmental Justice, where he discussed it alongside distributional,
procedural and recognition based approaches, arguing that it usefully integrated the concerns
of those. Walker (2009) soon after made a similar argument, as well as seeing the appeal of
its reflexive approach. Other theoretical discussion has been offered by Holland (2008), as
discussed, and other scholars interested in sustainability and intergenerational justice in
capabilities terms. More recently Edwards et al. (2015) have sought to develop theoretical

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work on capabilities in the context of environmental justice by adjoining it with the

theorization of wellbeing, although their discussion of wellbeing largely in psychological
terms perhaps risks imposing a rather narrower (albeit more theorized) conceptualization of
capabilities than the original approach.
In terms of its application to specific issues, the capabilities concept has been used lightly
as part of a multi-dimensional justice framework in discussion of air pollution in Newcastle,
UK by Davoudi and Brooks (2014) and touched on by Whitehead (2009) in an article about
‘ordinary’ environmental justice and urban forestry, but neither really develops its application.
Although not using a justice discourse so explicitly, interesting critical work on Payments
for Ecosystem Services (PES) has attempted to define more sophisticated PES options by
conceptualizing payments in terms of increasing capabilities for communities that are stewards
of services provided to other communities (Polishchuk and Rauschmayer 2012 theoretically;
Kolinjivadi et al. 2015 in a Nepal study of water management). As noted earlier, recent work
on energy poverty and energy justice has also turned to the capabilities approach, but again
to date not yet fully mobilized it in application (Sovacool et al. 2014; Day et al. 2016).
Schlosberg and Carruthers (2010) make a more sustained case for the application of a
capabilities framework to theorizing environmental injustices to Indigenous communities,
and illustrate this with discussion of cases from the US and Chile. Here they argue that the
approach needs to be developed to incorporate a notion of ‘community capabilities’ and
‘community functioning’, which they argue are especially pertinent in Indigenous communities
where environmental injustices threaten social reproduction and the practice and survival
of culture, not only individual wellbeing (more on this below). Schlosberg (2012) has gone
on to make similar arguments about community capabilities with regard to climate justice
(see also Chapter 29). Schlosberg’s and Schlosberg and Carruthers’ understanding of capabilities
and functionings, though, is a little different from my reading of Sen and Nussbaum in that
they see capabilities as arrangements that enable healthy individual and community func-
tioning (‘the capabilities necessary for functioning’ 2010: 16), with the functioning being
therefore the implied normative goal, rather than capabilities being the opportunity to engage
in specific functionings and therefore capability sets being the object of concern, which is
my interpretation. However, as noted earlier, the ontological distinction between capabilities
and the arrangements that enable them is difficult to make and so these positions may not be
entirely distinct.

Advantages and challenges

The emphasis that the capability approach puts on focusing on what people can actually be
and do as a basis for thinking about equality and justice is appealing. When brought into
environmental justice arenas, the approach provides a framework that invites recognition
of the links between the environment and many important outcomes in people’s lives;
indeed, formulating claims of environmental justice and injustice in capabilities terms means
that these links need to be explicitly argued for. A great range of such links and arguments
might be made, and objective and subjective dimensions with plural forms of evidence can
be embraced.
The approach provides space for addressing different needs, and in doing so is more
sophisticated than a simplistic equality approach. In taking the individual as the basic unit of
analysis, it is more open to the emergence of important differences within communities and
collectives – unlike approaches that keep their focus at the level of communities, neighbourhoods,
or other spatial or collective units.

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The approach’s focus on the individual, though, is sometimes criticized, or discussed as a

shortcoming (e.g. Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010; Schlosberg 2012; Dean 2009) for failing to
see how capabilities, and claims for justice and injustice in those terms, might apply to groups
or communities, and/or because it prioritizes individual freedom over solidarity. Nussbaum
(2000) explains that the reason for assessing capabilities at individual level is to avoid overlooking
systematic inequalities that occur within social units such as the family, for example according
to gender, a particular concern of hers. Hence, the capabilities of all individuals must be given
attention. This doesn’t have to mean though that different individuals’ capabilities are not
understood as intertwined. Still, some capabilities only make sense at a collective level, as
Schlosberg and Carruthers have been keen to point out with respect to cultural identity and
cultural reproduction. However, as Sen 2010 (p. 246) argues, there is nothing in the approach
that excludes the notion of group capabilities, but they are only ascribed value within the
approach to the extent that individuals ascribe value to them. The approach does not preclude
collective action or collective interest, but individuals must support that and feel that it has
value to them in some sense. The individual focus of the capability approach has also been
interpreted as Western-biased (Gaspar 1997; Dean 2009) but this is something that both Sen
and Nussbaum vigorously refute, citing numerous non-western, especially Asian, political,
cultural and philosophical reference points.
Apart from the approach not providing a complete concept of justice, or a roadmap for
how to achieve just outcomes, as already discussed, the most significant set of criticism is
that relating to the perceived inoperability of the approach. This is in part connected to the
amount of deliberation that it calls for, especially in Sen’s version – without any guidance on
how to organize a good deliberative process, no mean feat in itself as the large literature
on that topic attests – and in part connected to the difficulty of measuring capabilities, which
are things that people could do, not necessarily what they are doing. With regard to the latter,
in practice applications of the approach have sometimes worked with functionings (what
people can be observed as doing) as more practical to gather data on, or a combination of
functionings and capabilities (see e.g. Burchardt and Vizard 2011; Anand et al. 2009). With
regard to the former, there is no doubt that defining the capability sets of interest, with attend-
ant thresholds and weights, is a significant challenge in research and practice. Nevertheless,
several examples of guidance and good practice exist for building on (e.g. Alkire 2007;
Robeyns 2003; Burchardt and Vizard 2011). The scale of analysis has a bearing of course –
comparisons at large scales, such as the HDI, may find it practical only to work with aggregated,
quantitative measures, whereas community level projects are likely to find deliberative
processes easier.
Mobilizing the approach across scales is a further potential challenge. For Nussbaum, the
important scale is the state, as that is where she locates the responsibility for delivering
the Central Capabilities. Sen’s approach is flexible enough to be applied at different scales but
its reliance on deliberation probably inclines it more to smaller scale applications. Schlosberg
(2012) nevertheless ambitiously proposes the use of a form of capabilities framework at
international level for constructing (collective) claims relating to climate justice and injustice.
He does not provide a full answer to the challenges of finding an appropriate arena for inter-
national negotiation or of how to deliver and enforce international justice in the absence of
a global legislative or judicial body, but nevertheless the idea of introducing capabilities
thinking to international negotiations is intriguing.

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Conclusions
The capabilities approach is persuasive in its argument that we should focus on real outcomes
for people as the basis for assessments of inequality and for claims of justice and injustice.
In environmental justice work, this means it can be applied very effectively based on the
explicit making of links between environmental issues and multi-dimensional human
wellbeing. It pushes us to recognize the many ways in which environmental resources
underpin our essential functioning, and the ways in which quality of life and human dignity
are undermined by poor quality, hazardous environments. It is fundamentally anthropocentric,
but no different in that from most formulations of environmental justice, and more recently
some authors have been interested in the possibilities of extending its scope to non-human
species.
Sen’s and Nussbaum’s developments of the approach have some important differences,
with Nussbaum’s being more normative and based around an idea of state responsibility
to its citizens, whilst Sen’s is more in the vein of a conceptual framework to be adapted to
varied contexts. Neither, however, provide, or aim to provide, a full account of justice. They
do though provoke examination of the distribution of resources and conditions that underpin
what people are able to do and to be, including environmental resources; they also really take
seriously people’s different characteristics and circumstances, and how they affect what people
need in order to flourish, which gives significant room to a kind of justice as recognition (see
Chapter 10). Both also take democratic decision-making very seriously, with Sen’s approach
being especially built around deliberative processes. The approach leads therefore to a quite
comprehensive understanding of environmental justice.
There are undoubtedly challenges in applying the approach in practice, which goes some
way to explaining why capabilities thinking in environmental justice to date has stayed rather
conceptual. Nevertheless, because of its flexibility, emphasis on contextual specification and
practical rather than idealist aims, it is in many ways an ideal approach for scholars, activists
and practitioners to try out in various contexts and more work in this vein would certainly
enrich the environmental justice field.

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