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Sustainable Development: Capabilities, Needs and Well-Being

It is somewhat thought-provoking that this book is first written 24 years after the publication of the Brundtland Report (Our Common Future, World Commission on Environment and Development, Oxford University Press, 1987), which brought the notion of sustainable development (SD) onto the international agenda. The Report was firmly based in the human development approach—the meeting of basic needs of both this and future generations was given a central place, and thus one might have thought that the capability approach (CA) would have taken up the issue of sustainability. Alas, it has not. One of the veritable aims of this book is to mainstream SD in the CA development agenda. The concept of SD has three subcomponents: a concept of development, one of ethics (obligations) and one relating to the environment—sustainability. As the subtitle suggests, the book concentrates on the first of these. All chapters reject uni-dimensional notions of well-being, and support an overall aim of human flourishing rather than increasing happiness. One can discern three criss-crossing pathways: a basic needs approach, a CA, and a life-chances approach. In his excellent chapter, John O’Neill argues in favor of a needs-based approach to SD. Against the preference based understanding of sustainability dominant in welfare economics, he argues, quite rightly, that it fails to capture the unsubstitutability of different kinds of goods. A patient may prefer holidays to drugs but in terms of healthcare they are not substitutable. The chapter also contains an interesting discussion of the needs versus capabilities approach. Following Wiggins, he argues that the difference between the basic needs and capability approaches may not be that great if we understand needs in terms of a verb form (‘Joe needs to be able to eat adequately’) rather than