Understanding and investigating relationality in the capability approach

The capability approach (CA) is a framework for understanding, assessing, and promoting the quality of human lives and social justice. It focuses on capabilities – people’s freedoms and opportunities to live in valuable ways. Although its proponents readily acknowledge that capabilities can depend on personal, social and environmental factors, little attention has been paid to the ontology of capabilities (what they are and how they are caused and constituted) and the inherent relationality of the approach is often not well followed through in research and practice. This, we suggest, leaves the CA vulnerable to misinterpretation and misappropriation. In this paper we draw on the complementary lenses of critical realism, hermeneutics and complexity theory to develop an explicitly relational ontology of capabilities that explains how capabilities, as potential for ways of being or forms of doing, are generated by both personal agency and material and social structures. We demonstrate how these lenses can illuminate the relational constitution of particular capabilities through reference to a composite case involving a man called Bert and his healthcare team. We outline how our relational ontology of capabilities can demand and support more theoretically coherent and socially just approaches to CA informed practice, research and policy.