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Amartya Sen's Capability Approach, Democratic Governance and Japan's Fukushima Disaster

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Sachie Mizohata
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The capability approach (CA) pioneered by Amartya Sen and developed by many others has become decisively influential over the last two decades as a normative framework for assessing social arrangements, social justice, equality, and quality of life, as well as for designing policies (Robeyns, 2011). The CA has also been seen as a theory of social justice seeking to reduce social exclusion and inequalities and to enhance global justice. The CA is probably best known for having inspired the creation of the Human Development Index (HDI) in 1990 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to annually rank countries by level of human development or well-being. This well-known approach has played a key role in advancing alternative ideas about development and welfare, rather than GDP growth. Thus, evaluated in CA theoretical terms, countries like Japan, for example, may not necessarily be judged to be rich, although on paper, by such measures as GDP and per capita GDP they may rank amongst the world's most prosperous nations.

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Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 39 , September 2011 , e5
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2011

Footnotes

Japanese original text is available: https://apjjf.org/data/Sachie_Japanese_Translation_20122_.pdf

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