¿What kind of deliberative democracy is required by the Capability Approach?

FACUNDO GARCÍA VALVERDE

Managua

Conferencia; 13th Human Development and Capability Approach Association Conference (HDCA; 2013

Human Development Capabilty Association

Amartya Sen and his version of Capability Approach defend two basic premises: a) Value Pluralism and b) Democracy as a correct procedure to deal with value pluralism. In this presentation I claim that the connection between these two premises is not as straightforward as Sen seems to think. I will construct two ways in which this connection could be built (Disagreement Path and Inclusion Path) and I will show that one of them could not be really committed to the second premise because it would lead to Procedure Pluralism, that is, that democracy is not the only legitimate procedure to take public decisions. The discussion of these two Paths will not be carried in abstract or as applicable for any decision making but only to small-scale participatory development projects, which, especially after Sabina Alkire?s Valuing Freedoms, have been using Senian version of the Capability Approach as a general theoretical framework. In this context, I will take three main objections posed to these projects, all of them related to conflict among values and show how only one of the two paths could give democratic replies. The structure of the presentation is as follows: a) reconstruction of Senian value pluralism; b) analysis of the Senian arguments for democratic procedures; c) formulation of the Disagreement Path and the Inclusion Path; d) a brief reconstruction of the participatory development projects; e) a reconstruction of the normative objections to empirical applications of participatory development, and f) how each of the Paths will deal with these objections.